


Redshift

by 35grams (caxxe), seitsensarvi



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Denial, Guilt, Historical, M/M, Medical, Mutual Pining, Nautical, Slow Burn, Suspense, Vampires, late 19th c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-23
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2018-09-01 15:14:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 30
Words: 81,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8629144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caxxe/pseuds/35grams, https://archiveofourown.org/users/seitsensarvi/pseuds/seitsensarvi
Summary: A physician, a biologist, and a vampire board a maelstrom-bound ship.Levi: seitsensarviErwin: 35grams





	1. Chapter 1

The afternoon sun glared at the lashed masts and steel columns of the SS Maria as she drifted along the Cretan coast. Wharf rats and passerby stop to watch longshoremen prepare to dock the ship with the ease of routine.

"Erwin."

Erwin looked up at that, up from the seat he sequestered at the dining hall of an inn whose broad windows opened on the Maria, up to a pair of shining brown eyes. 

He smiled and stood to shake their hand, but his guest wouldn't have it, barreling into him and striking not a little awe in him at how easily they nearly lifted him off the ground. Trailing behind them was a stunned young man with his hat in his hands and what looked like half a dozen cases of luggage by his side. 

Erwin offered a hand and assumed correctly that the man was more comfortable with the more traditional greeting between two parties who've never met in person. 

"Mister Berner, is that right?" Erwin said as he pulled up chairs for them. 

"Yes, sir. I'm sorry, sir, if Zoe-"

"That's alright," Erwin said as he signaled a waitress. "I'd much rather sponsor someone with Miss Zoe's enthusiasm than-"

"None of that 'Miss' stuff, Smith," Hange said after having downed a cup of tea whole the moment the waitress set it down. Moblit shot them a look as he moved their luggage closer. "You Englishmen or Germans or whatever may be behind the Greek on neuter nouns, but-"

"Germans are just fine about it," Moblit mumbled as he took his seat.

"-doesn't mean you have to drag the rest of us down with you."

Erwin raised his hands apologetically. "Of course. We of the crown," he began with mock reverence, "can never seem to budge from just the two."

"Doesn't seem to apply to empire-building."

Berner blanched, but Erwin only smiled and plead guilty there, too. This man - Hange's assistant, about whom Erwin knew a great deal from Hange's letters - will understand soon enough that Erwin cared more to know the number of stitches in every black coat in the Russian Empire than for national pride. 

His eyes roved over their luggage, full, he knew, of every manner of instrument and solution. "Packed with extreme care, I hope?"

"Yeah, yeah," Hange said with a full mouth when their meals arrived. Erwin chanced a glance at the missing buttons on their coat and the mismatched socks under pant legs rolled up at different lengths under their hitched skirts, and glanced meaningfully at the assistant. Moblit, with the glazed eyes of a man who must have volunteered the decisive majority of said care between the two of them, simply nodded. 

Hange joined him that evening as Erwin strode along the docks. With their hair tucked tight into a hat and a loose-fitting jacket swallowing the curve of their waist, they looked every bit the Hange Erwin knew from their letters. 

"Thought you swore off skirts."

"Thought you'd look older."

Erwin smiled to himself. They walk in silence past one pier, past two.

"It's easier when-" Hange started, "I don't know. When I think of it as a disguise. A secret identity. You know?"

The moon skipped on the surface of the sea.

"No rush to judgment this way," Erwin said. "No hysteria. No witch hunts, no wasted time."

A stiff wind plucked at their hair.

"Yeah," Hange said with something like relief. "Yeah, you get it."

When they turn back and near the inn, Hange tells him they can't wait to hear more about him and how thrilled they are to meet in person at last, tells him he must have been so young when Hange's grandfather cured whatever it was that ailed him and, tells him cheekily how great a coincidence it was that he should write just as Hange was in need of a sponsor to travel and hunt for academies in America. 

The next morning, Erwin leaned against the ship's port-side bulwark and watched passengers groggily embark. Hange's assistant rose from the bowels of the ship and strode over with the gait of a man who must have practiced his movements for the past half hour. They made uninteresting small talk for a minute or two before Erwin spared him the stress of initiating.

"You have a question, Mister Berner," Erwin said easily. 

The man froze, unfroze, laughed too-loudly and coughed too-forcibly in a succession that betrayed the intent of every gesture that came before it. Finally, he scrubbed his hand over his face and visibly tried to untangle his tongue. 

"I'm - we're - very grateful, you understand-"

"I do."

"European academics are so stiff, so set in their ways, you wouldn't believe it-"

"I believe it."

"-and we keep hearing about...well, you know, all that 'paved with gold' stuff is nonsense, but there's no ignoring their patent office, sir, handing them out like candy-"

"I'm familiar."

"-and frankly, we- we would've had to search for months, years for a sponsor in order to travel and stay- you understand. Zoe isn't the most...traditional...person. In any way."

Erwin smiled. "And thank god for that."

"Even finding, somehow, the one vessel in probably all the world that won't fumigate our luggage and damage our samples. All this is to say, well, that we're grateful, and-"

"Nothing you say to me, Mister Berner, could possibly change my mind about our arrangement at this juncture."

Berner relaxed by a hair, but no more. Erwin admired that. Hange didn't need an assistant who believed every syllable of what he was told. 

In one breath, he said, "I can't believe this arrangement is a coincidence, sir."

Erwin looked away from the docks to give him his full attention.

"It isn't. I keep in touch with the family. Word travels."

"This isn't a small thing. This is years of your life. This is your reputation."

"All of which I owe to their family anyway."

"That's what this is to you? Repaying a debt?"

"Not entirely. I could have sent money. Recommended Zoe to a colleague."

"Then why-"

"Would it surprise you if I said I was bored?"

Moblit scoffed. "That's it? It's that simple?"

"Most things usually are."

Moblit's shoulders descended by another hair. "Alright," he said with a conditional finality that promised that this line of questioning wasn't anywhere near finished. "I didn't mean to pry-"

"Please do. I don't want any resentments or doubts growing between any one of us."

Moblit considered him as a crewman shouldered past them with cables slung over his shoulders. "G-good. That's good." 

Moblit excused himself, as satisfied as he would ever be and with the faintest thread of surprise in his brow that Erwin had welcomed his doubts, and once more, Erwin was pleased. The man wasn't giving in, and good for him. Hange was a good judge of character.

He felt a firm hand on his shoulder as the captain hurried by with a quick "Smith."

"Zacharius," Erwin returned. The captain gave him a parting nod and made for the bridge. They would be leaving soon. Erwin watched the last of the passengers come aboard.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi: seitsensarvi  
> Erwin: 35g

The gigantic monster of a ship cast long shadows over the harbor. Wind lashed at Levi's face, harsh with salt. Seated on crates and almost fully hidden from view he watched her closely, akin to assessing a possible threat, an unknown. She had no visible sails gust could blow, her black paint stark against white even in the early morning light. It was a ship and it was a wooden whale, exhaling fumes — her belly hot with coal, an inferno.

He looked at the crowd before him, knowing not to expect any familiar face. There were entire families on the docks, boarding one by one.

He looked as if it would tell him what they were leaving behind, whether they were escaping something, or if they were simply hopeful. What had urged them out of their homes, those men and women and children too, but their smiles and hushed murmurs were laced with excitement. Promises of the travel ahead might as well go up to their heads. From what Levi had seen, most could afford the luxury.

He wondered if they’d planned for a way back.

Levi briefly thought of his home in turn, the memory unwelcome. He trusted the ocean to be an impassable frontier between there and himself. The land could be crossed too easily, no matter the thousand of miles. He could have been tempted to come back, and he wouldn't allow even the possibility.

He extended his legs. He felt tired, but he'd never made a habit of letting discomfort hinder him.

The doctor had come down the Aegean sea, _Ege Denizi,_ not a week before with all he could gather which was almost nothing ; two suitcases, one for his belongings, the other for his equipment and, tucked away safely in his head, numerous years of knowledge — the most precious thing he possessed. Almost nothing.

It was a special brand of luck he'd seemingly been cursed with, carving paths for himself, taking only the darkest alleys, the narrowest ways. To be given patronage to complete medical studies was common enough in the Empire. That he then be offered a first-class ticket out of « a difficult situation », as they had called it, and he scoffed in his mind at the memory, was a rarity. But he'd knocked at the right persons' doors, and he'd done the work, however questionable, to earn it. He'd learnt early enough to seize every opportunity.

The remaining passengers had been invited to board; a little girl running in circles around her mother, her dress swirling, and a few men smoking close by. He recognized French.

He waited until the last of them had disappeared inside. Making his way up to the Maria, he had nothing to look back at, and nothing he'd wish to hold safely in his mind to remember. If anything, perhaps he'd come to miss the sun.

There was a man standing right next to the entrance who didn't look any bit like a welcoming crewman helping guests, though Levi knew he'd been here all morning. Levi looked up at him as he passed by — too tall, he thought —, eyes firmly set as if to dare him ask about his travelling class not quite matching the quality of his clothes. He met a gaze that seemed much too lively instead.

Not stopping he set foot on board at last and the gate closed behind him, the ship swallowing him whole.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi: seitsensarvi  
> Erwin: 35g

Erwin shifted beneath the beating sun and thanked Providence for the thick hide of his gloves and the tight weave of his hat and his attire for barricading him against its creeping rays.

A few embarking passengers took him for a steward of the ship and he didn't mind at all, didn't even bother correcting them. He was that in all but name. 

He knew Zacharius. He'd traveled with him often. If not for business, then for pleasure. If not for pleasure, then for no reason at all. 

How needlessly today's explorers-to-be suffered for their imagined plight of being born several centuries too late and missing their imagined chance to discover new worlds. Nothing, Erwin thought, was more otherworldly than the sea. If he should cross its waters for a million of man's natural lifetimes, he might never touch the same drop, nor even its distant cousin. 

He wandered back to lean against the bulwark and smiled at the odd straggler as the waters gurgled below. It wasn't difficult to tell the seasoned traveler from the newcomer. Admittedly, that, too, was why he watched. Better to know early who among their guests might need a touch more guidance than others, a touch more attention should all the winds and all the rains in the world find their little toy boat and decide to play. 

He politely averted his gaze when, above even the waves hurtling against the shore, his ears caught the thundering of a little heart in a suitcase, and yet another in a second, as a woman whose own racing blood betrayed a face wrought of steel in its calculated calm. 

Erwin revealed the more unsavory flavor of stowaway and Zacharius, not minding a symbiosis, allowed him passage with reduced fare and, if the mood struck him, the same for a friend or two. The captain never asked how Erwin made his deductions and Erwin never volunteered the information. The captain did, on one such trip and with shore in sight, admit to him that he well knew that Erwin was more discerning than he let on. Admitted that he was not so starry-eyed in this business to assume that the only class of stowaway was the sort that Erwin presented: never without some affliction of avarice or licentiousness, never without blood on their hands and unrepentant in their hearts. Erwin didn't reveal them all. 

But Zacharius wasn't cruel, nor ever blind to an opportunity. Erwin was allowed his discretion for as long as he agreed to supply the rationed meals the crew may accumulate should there be one too many undocumented mouths to feed, out of his own pocket in the form of drinks once ship met port. Erwin couldn't imagine a finer arrangement. 

He watched her hand precisely one ticket to a port authority officer. The woman boarded, suitcases in hand, and followed the other passengers on quick feet. Not quick enough, Erwin knew, to draw attention. Just enough to reach the cabins where the owners of those little hearts could at last breathe and wipe the sweat from their brows. 

There were more of these little hidden hearts than in years past. Many more. Erwin stopped a passing crewman and asked that he inform the quartermaster that another three storage units of food and water be brought aboard. The man went on his way without question, having heard orders like this before. Erwin watched him go and wondered whether there existed a more lucid prophesy than the swell of fleeing mothers that an empire was about to fall. 

The very last clutch of passengers embarked as crewmen above and below prepared for the ship's departure.

One man returned his smile with a curt nod. Others returned it briefly before scattering to the cabins or to the rear of the ship from which to watch their homeland succumb to the horizon for the first time, for the last.

Yet another man caught his eye and, unlike any other that morning or even that season, held it as a thief would a dagger. He passed him by with the generous distance and prowl of a wolf. The man looked away only when it meant he'd need to turn his head, which, he made no secret, was far more effort than he cared to expend. 

Before he ducked into the cabins below, a morning gale disturbed his hair and cast its dark strands over the maelstrom-grey of his eyes, and for the first time that he could remember, Erwin wasn't as taken with the now-garish greens and blues the Mediterranean dressed herself in as the Maria passed her by.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi: seitsensarvi  
> Erwin: 35g

Levi urged the man's gaze out of his mind, the first he'd met, properly met, in days. It felt foreign. Could he have grown so used to watch and not be seen that he'd deemed himself invisible, seemingly for all but one pair of eyes ? He almost didn't consider the color. Almost didn't place it somewhere between ocean and sky.

After what felt like hours of waiting though precisely on time, the Maria made way, horn blasting loud enough to scare every bird off the docks in a disorganized flight. Levi felt his tension ease with each added foot between the coast and himself.

Time passed both slower and quicker at sea, depending on who was asked. More than once that morning alone, Levi found himself avoiding passengers in the lounge, avoiding them in the smoking room, then avoiding the promenade deck altogether. He had no intention of watching the land drown under the horizon, no desire to join the many passengers gathered under a heavy sun in farewell. Yet if he indulged in shameless honesty, he would admit to wishing to see for himself whether the waters he had admired so often from shore rippled differently when they were so deep, if the waves dared rise higher for they were all alone, their dance undisturbed.

One hour in and Levi had mapped the entirety of the three passengers floors, third class to first, every hallway leading to every restroom down to the storage cabinets, knew which doors were locked and which clicked just a bit louder.

Another hour and he added an estimate of the bridge, wardroom, the main deck and its crew cabins immediately after, the boiler room far down below. It was customary carefulness that made him consider every exit, even when there were virtually none. Old habits were keeping him alert, always had. They made his everyday diagnoses more efficient, but his mind, a whirlwind.

There had been tales of steamers' beautiful interiors passing fast amidst the crowds whenever one of the giant ships arrived or departed from the port city, and Levi could see for himself how that wasn't entirely a lie when one found pleasure in craning their necks at obscene angles to glance at polished high ceilings, in marveling over dark mahogany panels carved in the latest Victorian fashion, in marble stairs, revoluting twice.

The physician had never traveled with that much luxury before, never properly traveled much at all, but he knew travelers. He'd met the tides of men coming and going, restless, students and scholars from the West, bringing some of their knowledge, taking some more back home with them. And he'd met entire families fleeing a few hundred miles south to escape armies marching over their homes without a care, patients he had looked after for not a coin when he could spare it. Those were the only ones he had ever known, and now he was neither, he was both.

For a moment he wondered if any of his fellow, less fortunate countrymen could have found a way on this very same ship like he had, save for the boarding ticket. To say that such stories weren't unheard of was an understatement.

Levi resolved himself and found a secluded place to settle in the library next, a half-hearted effort to blend in or perhaps disappear in the open. If he had been feeling playful, he would have bet on the time it would take for a complete stranger to come and initiate a conversation.

All too soon, his near-aloneness was interrupted when a cheerful voice asked from above, "Mind if I sit at your table ?"

It had taken not half an hour. It beat his most generous expectations.

Levi heard the chair across him being pulled and lifted only a brow, eyes not leaving his book.

"Hardly my own table."

"Is it not ?"

He eyed the intruder before him, her hands tight around some heavy medical volume or another. The blonde woman was clad in uniform, he noticed first. Ship crew. He didn't know he should have expected to see officers taking breaks in the passengers areas. She eyed him amiably, chin pointing at his own reading.

"Some sort of doctor you are, sir ?"

"Some say it's never too late to take up new hobbies."

There was a pause before she replied.

"I didn't mean to sound abrupt, it's only that I always try to meet the fellow doctors on board. They tell the best stories. And I got plenty of free time in between the occasional finger caught in wires," she joked, and it didn't sound anywhere near true.

She extended her arm next.

"Nanaba, head surgeon on the Maria. I got much better books in the office if you ever want to pay a visit."

Levi shook her hand but did not reply, practiced neutrality on his features. That the Maria had her doctor be a woman was unlike anything Levi had heard of before. He nearly inquired. But Nanaba had asked nothing more, and they read in silence for a little while. It appeared she was tolerable. Levi noted to be twice as careful around her.

He had gone through a few more chapters when she lifted her head and waved across the room, the movement sudden. She rose and bid a quick goodbye, aimed at him yet sounding like it was for no one in particular.

Levi couldn't see who it was the surgeon rejoined, spiraling through the many stuffed chairs. He only caught the shape of broad shoulders behind one of the frosted glass doors. It was mundane, it was nothing, but he had grown wary of anyone hiding so impeccably from view. He too had been doing too much of the same. Whoever that was must have been looking for the ship doctor, not himself, and yet he felt an itch under his skin. It sounded ridiculous. He had known one too many ridiculous circumstances recently.

He thought of all the faces he'd come across, trying to remember if any other struck him as too interested, curious beyond situational wonder. He thought of the deck, the lounges, the hallways. Busy families finding their rooms. The buzzing ballet of boarding. A girl playing.

He thought of blue eyes, oceans and skies.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi: seitsensarvi  
> Erwin: 35g

"How many?"

Black waters whisked away the captain's question. It churned with it the last light on the horizon.

Erwin pushed off the balustrade and led them to the captain's quarters. When the lock turned, Erwin spoke.

"Many."

Mike sighed loudly and fell into a chair. "They're getting outbreaks, stateside, you know."

"Severe?"

Mike gave him a look. "Does it matter? If a single innocent person dies of consumption because you let a rat board my ship-"

"These people are also innocent-"

"Doesn't trouble you, does it, to exchange one life for another?"

"Don't do that."

Mike scrubbed his hand over his face. The floor rocked beneath their feet.

Erwin crossed the cabin and returned a book to a secured shelf. He'd borrowed it during their last voyage, but hadn't finished before they met shore. 

"I've spoken with a great deal of them today," Erwin said. "Working men. Teachers. Musicians. Find me a rat that plays with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic."

"Our friends across the pond couldn't care less if we carried Wagner himself."

Mike's eye was twitching. Erwin turned to look at him fully. He approached him, studied him more intently. Mike frowned at the sudden turn.

"Something happened," Erwin said.

Mike didn't put very much effort into refuting the guess.

Erwin sat in a chair opposite. "Someone connected an outbreak to this ship?"

"Nearly," Mike said. 

"You should've told me sooner."

"Nothing happened," Mike insisted. "It wasn't us. But I'd prefer if we continued our arrangement with a little more care. Now, it'll take just the appearance of a connection and I'm done. You know how they are. Port Bosses can't wait to get one of their own at the helm, the snakes. Smith. How many?"

He could lowball. Mike wouldn't know. But now, this appeared less a battle to win for the sake of it than one that needed to be lost to win the war. He'd met no other captain who would entertain an arrangement like theirs even as a joke. Mike couldn't lose his post. They'd saved so many.

"Dozens."

Mike blinked. He leaned back. He shut his eyes.

"Perfect."

"We can administer a physical on board and quarantine whoever needs it-"

"Right. Let's just expect them to waltz right over and not think it's a ruse to expose them."

"I'll convince them."

"Another thing. Can't be ship staff who does it. One of these musicians or teachers of yours will talk and then we're right back where we started."

"Not staff, then."

"Are you volunteering?" Mike joked.

"No, I'm only-"

Mike narrowed his eyes. "Hold on. You assisted Nanaba a few years ago."

He had. A contaminated shipment of gruel had stretched the abilities of their nursing staff. Erwin had assisted the ship's surgeon wherever he was needed.

"Yeah," Mike went on with naked relief. "You can-"

"Remember to thank Nanaba for her wonderful direction, because that's all it was. I just happened to have glanced at an anatomical text or two when I was young."

"Looked a lot more capable than that."

"Mike, If we're going to do this-"

"Better to do it right, I know.  We'd need to find a physician on board. Convince them to do it-"

"They will."

"And convince them to not blackmail me for the rest of time-"

"They won't," Erwin promised.

Erwin checked boarding records. Three physicians and five nurses were among the Maria's passengers. The first was a New England man returning home from a vacation in Rome. He spoke of his practice glowingly and recalled his patients with a fondness one usually reserved for old friends. Erwin all but had his man. 

"And you, sir?" the man asked of his profession before knocking back a glass at the ship's port-side salon.

"I manage an immigration office in New York," Erwin said leisurely, and tuned out the other heartbeats in the room to focus on that of the man before him. 

"My condolences," the man said with a stiff laugh.

"Sir?"

"I do trust you're doing your due diligence, son," he said. His heartbeat thundered. "My nephew works for a Catholic now. A Catholic, Mr. Smith."

Erwin bid him a good night and continued his search. 

The next man spoke in whispers and looked over his shoulder incessantly. The collection of horseshoes round his neck jangled with his every step. His coat was more stain than coat, and they began their exchange with the man swearing that he has just the herbal remedy to straighten the curve of Erwin's nose. 

Erwin bid him, too, a good night.

By then, it was too late to strike up polite conversation with the third, wherever he may be. It had taken most of the night just to locate the two, having only the barest physical description in their records. 

He passed by a couple he'd spoken to earlier and smiled. They returned it. Both of their passes were forgeries, as were their parents'. Three nights ago, counter-insurgents bombed the inn that had been in their family for four generations.

A movement just beyond his eye and a heart-rate spike drew his attention, and in moments, there stood Nanaba at the door to the library.

"Hey sailor," she ribbed. They embraced, having not yet met past a passing wave while Nanaba had spent the day acquainting herself with the medical needs of the ship's oldest or most needing of care.

"Prowling around at night again?"

"But doctor, sleep is so inefficient."

"No kidding," she said more seriously. 

Her movements carried a latency and her face, a light flush, from the ordeal of surveying hundreds of passengers in a day.

"You need to rest," he said.

"I still have patients to-"

"The nursing team will take care of it. Now, off, before I tattle to the good captain."

"Sure, sure, I'm off," she said. Her pulse quickened as she spoke. She was lying.

"What a cad I would be if I didn't escort you," he said. Her mouth twisted, but she sighed, admitted defeat and lead him out of the hallway. 

As he passed the library entrance, he became aware of a mistake he'd made. Not one but two heartbeats had stuttered in recognition when he'd neared the library. Before leaving the hall, he caught a glance at a familiar face, and that curious beat became a roar.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi: seitsensarvi  
> Erwin: 35g

It started with a drop on the forehead. Then another one, just short of the nose, and another again falling in open eyes. Then rivulets flowing down a weathered face, carving water paths, kissing dry lips. It started as a drizzle, soon a downpour. He sucked in air and it was water first. It caught in a tight throat. He tried to rise but he was pushed back down every time, again, and again, until exhaustion came. He could not move a limb and none felt his but he was there, inside this form, feeling every thing it felt, and he would have begged to be able to dig fingers into the pulsating pain coursing over it, to remove every radiating nerve with his own nails. He would have begged to make it stop except no sound was coming out of his mouth, and it was for the best. He never begged.

He wished he could have begged.

Levi jolted awake. He felt the cold burn of sweat first. Seconds became minutes before the buzzing of his head stopped, before he was sure that it was his body he was in, not any dreamed one, and that he was unharmed, and that he breathed.

He was in an unknown room, the thought alarming, until he remembered. He could barely distinguish the velvety curtains. He knew they were deep red. Couldn't make out any color in the dim light, almost no light at all. Couldn't decide between keeping what little warmth he had and getting out of the nightmares-filled sheets. He didn't move. So little time before, the lush comfort of the cabin had made him consider not setting so much as a toe outside the room for the entire duration of the trip. Now he needed out.

Every piece of clothing felt bruising against his skin. The cravat was tied around a sore throat, out of habit more than necessity, looser than usual. He would fix himself a remedy, later, before it became an inconvenience. It was an infortune that he knew no cure for decades of stolen nights. A small pointed knife found its usual place against his leg. Habit, and necessity.

It had been months since he'd last been woken so violently and he hadn't quite missed experiencing the many subtleties of drowning in vivid details. He blamed the change of scenery.

Maybe he would also clean when he came back. The place was spotless. He'd clean nonetheless.

Levi made his way silently through empty hallways, aware of little but the ship's sway, harsher than before; in each step, in between them. There was no light behind the common rooms' glass windows, not a spark under any door. Only the bitter smell of smoke betrayed what must have been an animated, late evening for many.

His feet carried him somehow, crossing one polished floor after another, hushed, until he reached his destination. There was a broken lock on one of the doors leading to the deck, east side. He had noticed the oddity during his earlier round, every door impeccably closed with their unique matching key. Every but one.

Fresh air hit him sharply, and it was a relief. His hands gripped the wooden rail and he let his lungs fill as much as they would, let the soothing breeze replace every thought until he needed not tell himself to breathe, until exhaling came easily again. For all the water submerging him in slumber, the sea had always remained calming. The blood beating in his ears came to a still. He hated how long it took, every time, to chase the ghosts away. Sleep had never been a close friend to Levi, barely an acquaintance. He met it when he must, never more.

No one was on the deck. No one was supposed to. It was that singular time of the night where no self-respecting man should have had any business being found up and about. Every soul was where they belonged, each inhhabiting their temporary chamber in their temporary hive; tucked nicely into bed, lulled by the rise and fall of the ship, or perhaps roused by their own terrors, their own dreams.

Arising thoughts kept drifting to the evening before and Levi let them. He was bothered. Doctors seeking out fellow doctors was either the sign of great partnerships, or greater distress. Levi was in the mood for neither. Perhaps Nanaba had not been lying when she'd said she always looked for medicaly trained passengers. She respected his trade, and that alone told him she must have had at least one good reason. He'd need to find out, eventually, which part of it was sheer curiosity.

The moon's light flashed patterns across serpentine waves. They reflected bright white like the thousand pieces of a broken mirror, moving. Sometimes enough drops met, and the pieces merged.

Hundreds on board and still he'd ran into him again. It was an exuberant notion, implying sheer luck, a chance in too many. The man could be a threat, or know too much — could even only have found himself in the right place at the right time, but he could be what Levi was running from. Nanaba could be too, or the entire crew. Even his uncommonly loud cabin neighbors, for all he knew. But neither Nanaba nor the family next door looked at him with eyes that would tear holes into his own, should they get half the chance.

Levi would have to know, sooner rather than later. He would go after the man himself if he must, when he'd cross his path next, or even before that. He didn't doubt the probability of a next time happening for even a second. He recoiled at the mere idea, but if it came to that, he could take care of a man, of a dozen. He wouldn't leave a trace. At sea, less than that.

A baslt crept into his too-thin jacket, icy. He rubbed the cold out of his knuckles. Night air did strange things to the mind; centuries of popular, inaccurate tales had kept the saying ingrained. Levi didn't dismiss it as quickly as usual. It was still a long way until dawn.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi: seitsensarvi  
> Erwin: 35g

A stiff breeze rippled  through his coat. The chill was welcome. There was a fire in Hange's letters, but it was a faint glimmer compared to their person. He wondered seriously if they might power a lecture hall with the physicality of their demonstrations.

He waved to the helmsman from the deck, illuminated just so by fading pools of moonlight. The helmsman waved back. 

Erwin made a habit of relieving helmsman of their shift every few nights. It wasn't the worst thing in the world to have a favor or two tucked away, and the captain hired good, honest men who wouldn't think to renege.

The ship swayed. Erwin loved the bustle of the daylight hours, but he wasn't immune to the pull of black, sloshing waters. He isn't sure why he resisted them, why he remains inside until the final lamp dims to step into the curdling void. He thinks he'd considered it once, and felt the answer so uncomfortable that he was content to forget it altogether. 

But it's difficult to forget the ocean when it rocks him in its cradle. Towers of stone and iron and smog alike smother the terrestrial wild. The bodice strings of society parties and artful conversation pinch until Erwin's reservoir of niceties narrows to a sliver, until every polished ruby and velvet cake and scarlet drape brightens even under candlelight as if to mock him with their brevity. 

Rubies crack. Cake is consumed. Drapery fades. Erwin couldn't say whether he anticipated their ends or has already, in a matter of speaking, met them all. 

He rested against the port railing as a heartbeat joined him starboard. Erwin listened to this same beat every night for the past three. He spent his days coming to know his last doctor from afar, knowing to be far more careful with his sort, even leaving the room if he suspected the man of drawing near. Nanaba couldn't tell him much from their encounter, which itself was informative. Though he checked their records again, he couldn't find another physician on board he hadn't spoken to who wasn't him. 

Erwin learned that he had come alone. He spoke rarely, and even then, with great reluctance. A ship's crew often had sterling insight into its passengers, yet it took days for the staff to offer anything at all, let alone anything of interest, anything that might help Erwin understand the man and to understand how best to approach him.

At last, it was a graveyard-shift deck hand who offered the first glimmer of insight. He grumbled knowingly as Erwin plied him with drink in his off-duty hours and confessed to seeing the man reading to a girl with a red scarf. A maid related that the man had tended a boy's wounds and refused his mother's payment. 

She didn't need to specify why the mother hadn't gone to the ship's nurses. Erwin recalled a pair of heartbeats in a dark suitcase and paid her generously for her silence.

He had his man. A pair of anecdotes was no dossier, but he wasn't about to refuse a trickle in a desert.

The ship lurched sharply. Erwin gripped the rail tighter but paid it no more mind. Strong currents tossed any ship as it passed into the open ocean. He spared a final thought for the clouds jealously veiling the sky.

He would need to approach him soon. The captain demanded updates on his search with greater regularity. But he couldn't speak to the man now. Not at night, when he wandered the deck restless as a ghost and twice as pale, nor during the day, in which he exercised his remarkable ability to either hide in plain sight or to silently dare Erwin to approach him with all the charm of a cocked gun. Or, in this case, a hidden blade. 

No, absolutely not at night. Though his man, Levi, he learned, stood not meters away, unaware of another not meters apart behind tethered lifeboats and spare equipment bundled several meters high, his heart thundered like a wild thing, seized as if pursued by something monstrous, something vile.

Erwin didn't pursue the thought. 

Instead, he slipped a thin pouch of valerian root tea beneath the physician's door and moved his wanderings to the other end of the ship. Tomorrow, he'll introduce himself to a girl with the red scarf.

 

 

-

 

 

The mother had come to him as discreetly as this type of patient always did, which meant carefully yet betraying febrile concern in the furrow of her brow, in the twitch of her hands, trembling. She'd spoke softly to him in English. Her son. Coughing she'd said, a lot of it, and “don't want to bother the medical personnel” and “could probably treat him myself, but I don't have the usual medicine on hand”. He'd understood.

Levi had replied in Turkish, taking a guess, and she had quietly deflated in relief. She spoke clearer then. She never said her name. He had not asked. He knew she would keep her secrets like a chest locked close over a treasure which was security, some; would sooner swallow the key than let anything slip out and that, too, he understood.

Indulging in curiosity or perhaps wondering if he should expect his cabin to turn into a makeshift office overnight, in the case he unknowingly wore his profession written on his face, Levi only inquired how she had known. She had replied with a smile. Something about her late husband being a doctor, and how it always showed in the assuming glances, the rolled-up sleeves.

The boy had open wounds on his hands and legs. Levi treated them too. He demanded no payment in return, only her discretion, and the promise to come back to check on the healing of a sore throat and small knees scratched raw. She had knocked on his door two days later with a healthier boy and another child, a girl with an unsatiable appetite for the detail of every book she wasn't yet able to read.

  


Levi eyed the pouch on the desk once more.  _Valeriana Officinalis_. Sedative. Efficient for insomnia, anxiety. In some cases, joint pain. Not poisoned, as far as he could tell. By all accounts, it was a gift. The gesture troubled him. He couldn't recall mentioning his sleeping habits to his new patient, but perhaps that too was obvious in the way he wore his shirts or in the set of his eyes, and he would need to thank her nonetheless.

The next day saw the doctor chasing after the ship's cleaners, holding back curses, trading a bottled favor for detergent and their word to never enter his cabin. If they had guessed or even remarked first-hand the following mornings that he then spent the dullest hours of the night cleaning beyond the frontiers of his guarded kingdom, once or twice, none mentioned it. He nodded at them when they crossed paths.

Despite the small arrangements, Levi still felt adrift, beginning to feel the absence of concrete ground to walk on, of dirt flattening under his weight. Out of all things. But his steps ran hollow inside the ship; outside, they were washed away in the sound of wind and sea.

The woman with her children had made him feel more at ease than the ready rows of help on board, too polite and too tight. He wondered where the others were, apart from her. If she even knew. Did they gather, the poor and the helpless, sensing each other unaligned, rendered out of place here and everywhere, or did they play their part seamlessly instead. Did the masks crack at night, and were their nightmares so different from his own. Survival had many shapes but only one taste, iron turned rust.

Settling at the too-small desk in his cabin, Levi started writing down the records of years of practise, at once an instrument for work and a testimony. Details on the sick and the healing, ailments and medication, dosages and sometimes side effects, for each patient — and from their names down to their hair color, he remembered them all. Heavy volumes had been too large a burdern for a wanted man to carry, but he could write it all again; page after page filled with neat cursive, neat and tidy; hour after hour spent collecting at his memories' well, until they ran dry.

He didn't see Nanaba again. He didn't see the man who chased him, whom he chased, either. At times, he'd lift his eyes or turn his head, passing a corridor or snapping from a thought, sharp, fully expecing to meet blue. He would compose himself then, scolding both himself and the expectation, unbidden, wondering what he could possibly want from the encouter; clarity or revenge, revenge for the disturbance, revenge for nothing.

He came upon other souls, sometimes welcome, most often not.

One morning, Levi was acquainted to two other scientists, and he asked himself whether the travel had turned into a science-themed cruise without him being aware. They'd been talking, all hushed excitement, until one of them exclaimed joyously in the middle of the otherwise silent library. Heedless of his patiece having run thin, Levi blurted a soundly “what the fuck” in their general direction as a reply and from this point on, noted to avoid both of them at all costs. He met the scandalized eyes of every head peeking from above chairs on his way out, straight on, daring them to add a thing.

Then, just before dusk, a man spotted him polishing his knife on the deck and offered him a purse, should he prove he truly knew how to use it, he sneered, clapping a heavy hand on his shoulder as if they were long-time friends. Levi eyed the ill-fitting burgundy suit one whole second, yanked and twisted at the wrist, hard, the next — until he thought the man would cry for help, releasing before he could. His answer about both dubious activities and lack of respect for physical boundaries was clear enough. He committed the wrinkled face to memory.

Both times, he could not shake the feeling of being observed.

When night came that day and the waves rocked the world, always harsher in the dark, he relented and finally steeped the tea. Eight grams precisely. The infusion was lukewarm and bitter on his tongue, far from unfamiliar. It made his limbs slow slightly, his eyelids seem just a little heavier, mercifully. It felt like earth, like sleep.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi: seitsensarvi  
> Erwin: 35g

 

Erwin peered past the open door of Hange's cabin for only a moment without panic before bolting inside and shutting it behind him.

"Hange."

They waved, though they hadn't spared him a glance, hadn't looked up from marking up three separate notebooks spread out about them on the cabin floor. If they had, they may have noticed the controlled shock in his face at the degree to which the room had become a biohazard in too short a time. Pitchers and baubles of sickly and unnatural-looking fluids and substances pitched and sloshed tantalizingly close to the lips of their containers as the Maria clutched to the coattails of a passing current.

"Moblit-" Erwin tried.

"He's on reconnaissance," they said, not only still without looking up but with the confidence that Erwin would know at all what that meant. In his infinite wisdom, he decided not to ask. 

"Are you comfortable?" He asked instead. "I apologize that I've been scarce - the good captain needed my attention for a crew-related-"

"Word around town is," they said, still scribbling furiously, "you're looking for someone."

Though Erwin knew Hange to be spare with pleasantries, he didn't expect to be pinned so quickly. 

"Am I so obvious?"

Hange shrugged.

"Well," Erwin said, "I have my man."

"Do you?"

It was a half-question asked with half an ear for the answer as Hange had spoken while burning holes in their notebooks, but the morning came back to Erwin anyway, one spent trading smiles and, soon, books, with a girl never apart from her red scarf. He'd read to her for an hour, maybe two. She couldn't, herself, so her eyes glazed over the note peaking out just so between the pages of a naturalist's adventures along the Alps, wedged inside the section of the journal in which the scientist studied jackdaws flitting about steep, unforgiving slopes. 

He'd read to the very height of the naturalist's adventures, right up to when the man struggled to keep his grasp on the rocky trail, and no more. He apologized profusely for needing to go so abruptly, but the girl was troubled for only a moment. 

There was another who could read the rest, after all. Another whose eye might be more discerning of the time and place written on that little note.

Hange looked up. "Stowaway?"

"You cynic," he accused lightly. "No, nothing at all like that. But speaking of unexpected," he started with a look at the still-pitching containers, one of which boiled over an open flame, "and potentially dangerous-"

"I just couldn't wait," Hange interrupted, eyes flashing. Their heart beat excitedly, but not quite like it did whenever he passed them waxing on to someone in the library about bacteria strains and protein chains. It was, though he didn't think it possible, even more frantic. "I didn't have enough time to try out a few things I found in grandpop's journal before I left shore-"

Erwin stilled.

"-and I was out of my mind thinking I hadn't packed enough bell jars but it turned out only one had cracked and I probably banged it around when we boarded but it's fine, I've sent Moblit to look for something that could replace it if I get far enough through this section of-"

"His journal."

"Yeah I had his old university colleagues - or their kid I guess, though he's a geezer now too - I had them send it over, and I mean, they really took their time - I asked for it months ago and he finally gets around to it days before I leave the continent? Oh - Moblit must've visited them on his way to Vienna the week bef- oh, that makes a lot more-"

Their babble was a ruse. 

"This isn't a courtesy call," he said.

Hange didn't look at him.Their heart in Erwin's ear nearly deafened their words. "No. It isn't."

"You're wondering why there's no single mention of me in that journal," Erwin said. The ship groaned. Hange's flasks nearly tipped. They looked at him, then, hard. 

Hange's family was the sort to keep exquisite notes, Erwin knew. They were a long, meandering line of men and women and everyone in between who each not only questioned  _Why_ and  _How_ but endeavored to find their answers and drag the rest of the world to them without a care for whether or not it was ready. They weren't the sort to leave out details.

It was a stroke of fortune, he'd once cruelly thought, that Hange's grandfather had passed long before Hange could corroborate Erwin's musings of him and all that the man had done for him in their correspondence. Erwin had meant every word. They had simply been meant for a man several generations removed.

Hange quieted. "Yeah. Yeah I am." They rose suddenly. "I'm stumped. We've got no savings for you to snatch, no reputation to exploit. And if you meant to do away with me or Moblit or both of us in whatever sick game you've roped us into, there's gotta be easier ways than trapping us in the middle of the-"

"It wasn't your grandfather who treated me," Erwin admitted. This wasn't the way he'd planned on approaching the topic, but inspiring mistrust and regret in the person he needed most in the world was not an option. His own heart deafened him, then.

Hange frowned. "Yeah. I put that much together-"

"It was your great great great...great grandfather."

Hange stared, visibly fearing for his state of mind. They leaned forward. "Try again."

Erwin shifted in the chair, suddenly aware of every wrinkle he didn't possess, though no number of them would have corroborated his claim. "I know. Believe me, I know how it sounds. I wouldn't believe it myself had I not lived it-"

Hange scoffed and threw their hands up, about to speak. The ship lurched. Finally, the clear and hazy and green and pink and every other solution had had enough. Erwin righted a pair of flasks before they teetered over entirely as Hange ducked and planted their weight on the flat deck to which half a dozen more were blessedly secured with clasps and strips of leather. 

Erwin followed Hange's widening eyes.The gas lamp that burned beneath the solutions slid off the edge of the table. He caught it in an ungraceful fumble and oil splashed across his hand and made a mess of his sleeves.

Hange made a strangled sound. "I'm sorry," they said, then again, and again, as the ship righted itself and they flew to rip open a cabinet and pry what looked like a makeshift first aid kit squeezed in between even more equipment.

"What is all this, anyway?" Erwin asked as he aligned the weighted wooden deck atop the cabin's desk as Hange tossed him a roll of gauze. They watched as he thanked them and used a modest piece of it to wipe excess oil from the cuff of his sleeve. The smell of burning flesh lingered.

"You don't make an awful lot of noise," they said warily. Their eyes followed his unhurried movements as he righted the rest of their equipment before, as if as an afterthought, he wound a convincing enough length of gauze around his blistering knuckles.

"It's really nothing," Erwin said, and though it was the truth, Hange went on to stare as if the intensity of it would rip the missing shout of pain from Erwin's throat.

"You've got some nerve. I mean that. Some. By which I mean not very much at all. In there, especially," they pointed at his hand. Accused it.

Erwin snipped off the rest of the gauze and secured the length across his hand with a pin. Though he'd made no attempt to hide this part of himself from his boarding partner anymore, he preferred not to tempt the far less forgiving eye of his dinner partner.

Hange scoffed. "You forgot to clean it. And put on a...a compress. And a-" They deflated. "The wrap is for show, isn't it."

They were catching on. "It is. Hange, I have an urgent appointment this evening."

"The hell you do-"

"Please let me finish," Erwin urged. He bent to gather corks and caps scattered about the room. "You have questions." He strode to the desk and began to stopper the open flasks. "I have answers."

"Erwin, if it's a false hand, just say s-"

"I'm afraid I cannot miss my prior engagement. It concerns the well-being of the crew. The captain will confirm this if you doubt me." He soaked spots of oil that remained on the desk with a nearby cloth. "But the moment I am free again, I will return and explain myself for the entirety of our voyage and beyond if it pleases you."

"Right. With only breaks to eat and sleep, I'm guessing."

"Not even that, if you insist." Erwin said sincerely, and this time, Hange did not appeal immediately to doubt. Their eyes grew distant. 

"I'm really losing it."

Erwin gave them what he hoped was a reassuring smile. He was encouraged by the impression that Hange did not have quite the ear that he had for a racing heart. They would otherwise be well aware of his threadbare confidence. They would know how dearly he needed them, how his gut lurched at this blooming mistrust. 

"I thought so, too, once," he said.

At Hange's incredulity, he lifted the gauze. The ruddy, bloating, peeling mess that had shocked them just moments ago had congealed entirely. The minute hand on the far wall had yet to complete its revolution. They rounded on him, grabbed his arm and must have unhinged their jaw for how low it hung. 

"But-"

"Just two short hours, and I'm yours. I promise."

"Yeah." Hange visibly struggled to let go of his arm. "Yeah. Unless you can also grow gills and swim back to shore."

"Not quite."

He took a step out of the cabin before Hange was again at his arm. "Explain."

Erwin looked around and tuned his ears, but no beating heart was anywhere close enough for its ears to overhear. He humored them. "In the spirit of transparency," he said, "I could. Swim back."

"We're in open waters."

"I wouldn't enjoy it, no."

Erwin glanced by the bridge on his way to the lounge. It was a fright, how the place bustled. The Maria's navigators argued in harsh whispers over their charts and brass instruments as the captain fielded inquiries from a dozen officers at any one time. 

They'd had worse weather. Far worse. That they survived those voyages to make this one was owed as much to preparation as to luck. A pair of engineers brushed past with heavy tools and debated the most efficient way to secure the engine room.

Erwin put it out of his mind. This meeting, and this crew, demanded his full attention. He'll be damned if they best a storm only to kneel to a virus. 

He stopped by his cabin and changed out of his ruined jacket before making his way to the farthest corner of the starboard lounge. The room had been cleared, reserved for two. 

He urged his hands to stop their trembling. He couldn't end the reel his thoughts spun before his eyes of the scene in Hange's cabin. He'd been so careful. Overlooking the existence of this journal will hound him for years. 

Hange's grandfather had been something of a recluse. Then, a drinking man. Then, a man who died too young and left too little behind. 

Erwin shouldn't have dismissed him, shouldn't have stopped digging, shouldn't have taken him and his shadowed past for an invitation to do with those phantoms what he willed. He should have known it was too easy. Maybe then, he could have gotten his hands on the journal and amended it with its author's hand. In writing, he could have corroborated the tale he'd spun into the family's circles, one that wove threads of this man who'd once treated a boy with a weak heart. One dyed in a truth two generations removed. 

He would sooner succumb to the devil in his blood than force Hange's hand. His silent, cross-generational meddling weighed on him enough, no matter the number of unexplained, unmarked checks, sudden invitations from prestigious academic journals, or loans for so long denied at last inexplicably approved to a cousin here, a brother there. His one hope was that curiosity's pull would be stronger in them than that of caution, even reason.

There was no caution in aiding Erwin. No reason in associating with a creature whose ear could find the beating heart of the man he hunted from three halls away.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi: seitsensarvi  
> Erwin: 35g

He resisted the pull of the sea. It had become more violent over the course of days. He woke up to trembling paper walls more and more.

It was an improvement; he fell asleep at all.

Levi encountered Nanaba again. It seemed she always wore a smile, she was, without fault, impossibly serious at the same time. His hard-fought battle against impatience had become resisting asking her how far west they'd reached. Levi asked about her personal stocks of valerian root instead, and she didn't think twice of it. She offered to get him some, he cleared her implication in the gift he'd received. Not her, not the nameless woman. It wasn't helping.

Completing the patient record had been a matter of days at best. Only one name was missing, purposefully left out. He'd have to find something else to busy his mind, his hands with. His mind most.

Still, on occasion, the entire floor would get busier and provide a distraction. A group of passengers or another would celebrate something of little interest, a game or a date or a hundred coins gambled and won back tenfold. One evening, a singer, her voice breathing life and waving twirls in the cloth of women's skirts. He'd observe then, better than ever, hawk chasing a prey with only its eyes like it would make it forget the cage. It was no different than watching the restlessness of the city, its laws and rules and the breaking of them; only busier, more confined. Much more obvious. But it was still the same, those who showed off, those who hid. It was when roles were switched and the first became the second, or the reverse, that Levi had learned to worry.

He would never see any familiar children at those gatherings, no worried mother either. He would see no one of interest at all. It became stronger in this absence, the need to find out what was hidden, possibly not so well. Possibly just some meters away. A worried mother, or a dozen more.

Levi stepped out of a pool of black, elongated shadows, into the harsh light bathing the deck, then inside, back to his cabin for the night or a part at least. Walls would tremble again. On the edge of sleep, he wondered if the brightness of the ship at night ever lured lost birds in like a moving lighthouse, deceptive.

 

The following afternoon, the little girl ran to him with a red-bound volume in her tiny arms, bigger still than the last, and demanded to know what happened next to the man on the mountain. She was so helpful as to show him where next was, lest he commit a mistake and repeat the tale. Levi eyed the note he found there in place of a bookmark. Black ink, curt. A place and a time.

“Did your mo-” he stopped himself. The child couldn't yet read, might not know if her mother had written it, or perhaps it was the entire point.

“Did your mom read the beginning to you ?” he asked instead.

“Hm hm.” She shook her head. “The gentleman did.”

A faint tremor passed through Levi, half a second of ice. It could be anyone. He had the certainty it wasn't anyone. He folded the note and stored it away in his jacket. A place, a time. If he was lucky, an answer.

“Alright kid, let's see what happens on the mountain.”

Black feathers flew as in a silent omen but, the girl was disappointed to find out, the scientist never fell.

He was used to them, the many children he met and cured and sometimes could not. Yet he talked to them like he would most adults, only gentler, Isabel had said once, and that was why they liked him. He had told her that he wouldn't know either way, never had a chance to read the handbook. But he hadn't complained. Levi resumed his reading. He had accepted children would always make him think about his former assistant. So young, too young. Too late.

He sent the girl back to her mother with an invitation to come back to visit; even share tea, if they wished.

Levi didn't have to search. He knew precisely where the lounge was, marked on his mind's map. Just next to the dining hall, but never as full. Not a private cabin so that he wouldn't feel trapped, yet removed enough to grant privacy. He supposed it was a sensible choice. He probably wouldn't get killed if he went; it had been but an afterthought.

He passed the palm of a hand over his waistcoat, straightening the fabric there. He waited. When at last he set off, just on the verge of lateness, the warming weight of metal pressed against his leg felt just a bit heavier than usual. He really liked silver the best.

He had borrowed the girl's book, as red as her scarf, indulging in the acting because if he was correct about who his correspondent was, he bet the man would know to appreciate the humor, the barely dissimulated threat behind it. He knew the game. Levi could have been the one to catch a hold of the stranger to satisfy an itch turned unsettling curiosity, and he could have been laughed at and dismissed in return. But he hadn't taken that step. The man, provided he was right, had seeked him out instead. Whatever it meant, Levi intended not to let him forget.

He advanced, book in hand, footsteps loud, and made little ceremony of opening the door.

He hadn't been wrong. He didn't feign surprise.

He met the other's eyes straight on, a clear display of the fire in his own like it wasn't becoming a default. Watched shoulders rise in the slightest at his arrival, observed the room's warm glow play across immaculately combed hair, turn it to gold. Levi took him in. Took his time.

His host was seated. Levi could only look down at him from where he was standing. Between them, two glasses and a bottle of wine, the universal request for conversation. He wondered to what extent all that he saw had been planned.   
  
Levi wasn't so deeply unsettled from finding himself on a stage without knowing his part, from the insistence of chance, no chance at all. Annoyed, yes. He would admit that. 

And the man looked nothing short of noble, all broadness and strength and calm. It annoyed Levi more. He couldn't read his face. Something stirred within, an unrest akin to the suspended seconds before the hit, seizing. The suspended seconds before the fall.

“Shame you didn't read the rest. Kid was thrilled.”

 

-

 

Erwin smiled, not an ounce of it forced. 

"I've always preferred beginnings," he said as the doctor stepped forward. Prowled. "New faces. Fresh starts." Erwin paused as much for effect as to appreciate the man, and let the doctor know so. "Possibilities."

Erwin had known him only in glances, known him by the step of his worn shoes against the deck and the touch of the evening sun on his nape. From the scent of long-washed blood from his hands, his own and not, no matter how many hours men of his profession bowed their backs and scraped remains from beneath their nails. 

He'd never had the opportunity to admire the harsh set of his brow, nor his bruising stare. He was, in Erwin's memory, not the least approachable man he'd ever known, but certainly one who most wanted to appear so. 

The doctor strode over without comment and lowered himself carefully into his chair to avoid glancing it with the concealed knife at his leg. 

Erwin held his own hands atop the table. Never hidden. His back, he kept loose, and his neck, open. If the doctor's hands were as skilled as his eyes promised, then Erwin's neck could become more open than he intended before the night was over. The thought arrested him. 

Their waiter, seeing the two seated, took their orders without lingering conversation and went immediately on his way.

"I'll be brief," Erwin said. "You're a busy man. I intend to make you much busier."

The walls rumbled. The doctor didn't blink. His blood roared.

"I occupy an informal role aboard the Maria. Adviser. Investor. Stewart." Erwin waved the titles away. "Simply, I am aware of a number of passengers among us who were unable to be properly examined by our medical staff. Nor are they inclined," he said, and glanced at the book the doctor had brought with him and pointedly set aside on the table, "to visit them now. But should they become aware of an opportunity for an...independent examination with an unbiased party, they may be more willing to seek aid should they need it. The risk of contagion aboard this ship would be greatly diminished, and individuals who may have misplaced certain documents needn't fear punishment." 

The man's face revealed nothing, though he'd at last calmed the rising drum in his chest. It was nowhere near a resting hum, yet settled enough that Erwin dared to imagine that he was giving thought to his words.

"Only I know the identities of our extralegal guests. The captain cares only that the situation is dealt with, and the medical staff will...accidentally misplace whatever equipment is necessary. You would communicate only with me."

Erwin pulled out a sheet of paper and a pen from his jacket. He placed them with his good hand before the doctor.

"Any sum, Doctor Ackerman. Any favor. I'm afraid I'm only well acquainted with New England medical boards, but I'm sure they would be a professional asset all the same should your final destination be further west. Should you have family yet to cross, it will be arranged immediately. Debts, repaid. Enemies, eliminated."

The waiter emerged from the kitchen, and Erwin smelled lamb's blood. 

 

-

 

Levi was sure he would drill holes into the man's face for how intently he was staring at him. It almost surprised him when the deep voice spoke, resolute and low, and didn't sound bothered. It almost surprised him again when he heard his own name, his quality, but by then he'd been expecting it. Of course the other had been searching. Of course he knew.

He wondered just how far this man could go, or pretend to. Would he offer to remove down to the last of the sultan's counselors, should Levi wish it. Would he turn off the stars, would he bottle the sea. The doctor looked down at the piece of paper, the pen beside it, and almost wanted to try it.

He had heard more than his share of empty promises.

“So you do know them. Stowaways. Their identity. But the ship still needs me,” Levi started, “On the side.”

“Or maybe there's a few heads missing on that list of yours,” he continued without missing a beat, “And it'd be a shame not to deliver the full package to immigration when we arrive. 'Suppose me rounding them up for you would be helpful.”

Or, he considered, the man was telling the truth, and they could collectively be into a degree of trouble he wouldn't have known to expect. Possibly already were. Confined spaces and illness and hundreds of people to pass it on sounded like one of his nightmares, one of his greatest fears.

Helplessness had never been not knowing every scheme of the mighty. It was the inability to prevent the worst, and sometimes, foolishly, the inability to bring the dead back. Much like his small child hands hadn't known how to medicate a weakening heart, how to steady a trembling smile, how to warm up an embrace long gone cold.

It always was that he'd wanted to cure every ailment, stitch close every wound. Those he opened himself, more. It was not reasonable.

The doctor let his eyes wander between them. Soon, catch on the side of a neck. Then, a hand, larger than his own, the skin fair.

He watched the other observe him, too, felt his gaze on him even when he averted his own, deep in thought. The man was letting Levi weigh his options, expectant, perhaps like one patiently waited to see an adversary reveal their hand. Knowing the extent of his gamble, intrigued by the gain of a win and the price of loss. Levi didn't know the cards he's been dealt with. It wasn't that he was averse to beginnings himself, not really. But the part unknown played was too great, the whole ordeal too grave to be a game at all. The frontier between saving and condemning was thin, was becoming thinner. Sometimes it could be a man. Sometimes, but an idea.

He didn't give an answer, not quite, not just yet. Instead, he cut into the meat in his plate with a practiced twist of his knife and just a bit more vigor than strictly necessary. It bled pale red.

“I don't know what's under those bandages, Sir Advisor-Investor-Stewart, but if it's an injury you might want to secure them better than this.”

This time, Levi intended not to meet the other's eyes as he spoke. They were, he'd noted, resolutely more sky than sea.

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi: seitsensarvi  
> Erwin: 35g

"Only a burn. Hardly the worst you've ever seen."

Erwin had anticipated rebuttals, the rat-for-hire one chief among them. Still, he hadn't imagined the doctor would dismiss him with such confidence. No, rather, with the weight of experience. If the man wouldn't be humored by a stranger, then Erwin could not be a stranger anymore.

"And to your allegations - Not at all. All these names are already known to me. But say that I was the sort of man to ignore all the myriad reasons that a person, a single mother, perhaps, might want to leave one coast for another." Erwin lifted his knife. "Say that I've never seen an empire fall," he lifted his fork, " never held more ash than air in my lungs or forced a partner's viscera back into his belly," he pierced the lamb and sliced, "because God forbid he hears the slap of it against rubble before he leaves me and a quarter of a battalion trapped in rebel land," he raised the slice to his mouth, "slaying starving men on empty rations for dukes and kings who wouldn't know hunger from flatulence."

The doctor's chewing had halted. Erwin's hand twitched at the memory of grass, red and tacky. He dotted a napkin to a stray scarlet drop at his lip.

"Forgive me if I'm vulgar," Erwin said. "But if I were faithful to your characterizations, these individuals would have been locked in the hold on the first hour of the first day." Pressed tight. Starved for air. "None of these men have a New York judge for a friend, I assure you." Human stench. Animal fury. Quieter, he said, "I didn't."

He tasted his wine and tasted the air between them. The one, smooth. The other, thick. He had a diverse palate. 

"If it pleases you, the moment I ask that you give me a single name would be the the one to end our agreement. You needn't fear it. I know them. Simply grant me your permission to send them your way."

"I won't threaten you, doctor." Hange's excited chatter returned to him. "It's a boorish tack and I'm...frankly, terrible at it. What I will say next is meant only as a statement of fact. Two men on this ship are coughing blood."  Leon. Baker. Irfan. Accountant. "Three more haven't left their beds in days." Antonia. Student. Rustem. Mercenary. Cosima. Midwife.

"My options are limited." Nanaba had forfeited the supply room key at the captain's request. "I can offer a spot of morphine here." The stench of ill blood lessened when the men slept. "A bit of valerian there." 

He should have known better than to bow to impulse. Still, the doctor had not repeated his nightly outings in such a number as before. 

"But I don't need to tell you what little good it does to muzzle a gaping wound," Erwin said. 

He leaned forward a touch. 

"If we cannot reach an agreement in a day's time, I will deliver these people to the medical ward. I won't be party to senseless death. Their illnesses may yet be treated, but their reputations will be ruined. I could pay fines and bail until the end times, but the moment they reach land, they will have a criminal record. A permanent stain."

He glanced at the blank sheet and pen. "I have a sizable fortune aboard for the odd emergency. The rest would be yours when we land. I've also cleared your name on the bridge. Visit it in its quieter hours and speak to the quartermaster, the surgeon, the captain. If not them, the maids. The crewmen."

The waiter cleared their plates.

"Confirm my character with the crew." Erwin smiled distantly. "I'm sure you'll uncover an embarrassing anecdote or two." 

He gave the doctor his full attention as he dragged his tongue across his teeth. "I insist that we be equals in this partnership, without exception."

 

-

 

Levi considered. Slow, drawn out. His eyes stopped on the man's lips. He spoke pretty words and harsh words with the same conviction, so strong it almost burnt, and they didn't sound untrue. He spoke to Levi's deepest core without knowing it, or maybe he had guessed, maybe he could tell even that.

The doctor didn't have anything to lose in accepting. No reason to refuse. He couldn't yet know whether he should trust that every of this man's tales be real, that he keep his word, but he needed to. He wanted to. The thought struck him.

He, too, was familiar with the smell of blood drying on abandoned bodies, barely living, and those not living at all. He knew the sight of the ones escaping, barely, of scattered missing limbs, small. And those not escaping at all. He knew the feeling of not being able to do anything but leave them behind.

Emperors stripped of godliness but entire people denied humanity. Levi wondered about the ghosts of the man's past, those he let creep behind clear eyes for emphasis or truthfulness or both, and wondered just how much they matched his own. 

He could have asked. He only breathed, deeply, once.

A day. No more than a day. Nothing.

Less.

"Alright."

He would not, could not throw bodies overboard, literally and not, for the sake of argument or pride.

"Fine. I'll help. I'll try. Long as you stand by this agreement."

He remembered a distressed mother's face and he remembered her voice, hushed as if speaking any louder would threaten her children's lives, as if a misplaced word would take them away.

"Supplies when I need them, if you can provide. No questions about patients except when they're relevant to the safety of the ship. Trust me to tell you what needs to be told and I'll trust that you ensure their security. On board, and on land next."

He watched his words ripple on the man's face, relaxing the strain of his brow, noticeable only if one were to look close. Levi had rarely looked closer.

"Don't promise money," he added, "not here. Not now. Shit, not now."

This was a vulnerable matter for the whole, for, if they were particularly unlucky, each and every one of the souls aboard; far too much to be bargained for. This was the reason he had pledged. Once they had reached the new continent, the man could cover him in gold if he so wished. Levi wouldn't oppose it.   
Before that, nothing but smoke.

"And... Intent's honorable but you got a bit of advance in being equals. You know who I am. Seem to know I don't sleep.” The thought sent a shiver down his spine, a memory of bitterness hot in his throat. It sounded aberrant to give thanks for a gift that would have earned a prying shadow a blade to the neck had he found out, so Levi didn't.

The doctor leaned back into his chair, just slightly. Eyed the bandages again, drank the last of his wine. There were a thing or two that he wanted to hear from no one but the other's mouth. That man could reveal terror and war and bloodied hands, and still not this.

“I'd guess you don't fancy copious amounts of rest, either. Leaves me with asking for only a name."


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi: seitsensarvi  
> Erwin: 35g

Erwin concealed his relief with a crafted smile. He couldn't name another time that he'd used all his best material in immediate succession and still held his breath. The doctor was as distrustful as he was obstinate. He grew alarmingly in Erwin's esteem.

"Erwin Smith," he said. Their plates and glasses cleared, Erwin rose to shake the doctor's hand. He held it. "I apologize for leaping into the matter without proper introduction. I know you'll understand my immediacy." He let him go. A solid grip.

He escorted the doctor from the lounge with a hand at the middle of his back, hovering just so before it fell. He paid it great mind as he regaled him with this or that about the ship and its crew, mindful from the way the man had watched every inch of his movement over the course of the dinner that he was not one to accept casual touch. 

Lounge regulars slipped in as they left its doors with their business concluded. The doctor's shoulders raised as the crowd engulfed them, eyes attempting to chart every idle hand and shifting eye at once. Erwin moved forward and carved a path for him. 

He passed an eye over them and occasionally greeted a familiar face. As they passed through, a man of a familiar build lingered at the edge of his vision with a hand in a trouser pocket raised in a distinctive shape.

"Mister Berner!" Erwin called, and the hand withdrew so swiftly at the introduction of so many pairs of eyes to his darkened corner that he'd nearly knocked his low-brimmed hat right off his head. 

"Doctor Ackerman," Erwin said as they drew nearer through the crowd and prayed that he'd blocked the man's view before his hawk's eye might have glimpsed the hand himself, "I must introduce you to Moblit Berner, an excellent assistant to my esteemed traveling partner, Hange Zoe, and a skilled technician in his own right." His eyes did not leave Berner as the two made do with the impromptu introduction, and though the assistant put on his best smile for the doctor and shook his hand, Erwin knew by the set of his brow that he knew this for the diffusion it was. 

With the pleasantries completed, Erwin wordlessly slipped a note into the doctor's hand with a time and cabin number before moving the assistant with a far more solid hand out of the hallway and down to Hange's cabin.

"While I enjoy a good thrill," Erwin said under his breath as they stormed out, "that was exceedingly irresponsible with such an audience present, Mister Berner."

"Not another word, snake. I'm taking to you Zoe or else-"

"Lead on, sir."

Hange groaned when Moblit, having shut the door to the dimmed room, withdrew the revolver and pointed it at Erwin.

"I told you," Hange said, "No theatrics."

Erwin glanced from one to the other. "Your assistant has an indomitable personality, Han-"

"Quiet," Moblit said. "This is my fault. I suspected this man had other motives and here we are." Erwin stepped forward. Moblit swallowed and went on. "Now he's cursed us." Erwin stepped forward. Moblit stepped back. "He's connected his fortune with ours." Erwin took the last step before the end of the barrel met his chest.

"If you intend to shoot me," Erwin said, "I beg you, do it. Otherwise, don't tease an impressive model."

Moblit's ears bloomed red. The revolver was discrete in size yet the decorative flourishes on its handle were distinct, a craftsman's hand. Erwin slowly lowered the barrel with his index finger. "I prefer your carving to your firing, Mister Berner."

Hange sighed loudly and marched between them, forcibly separating the two. Moblit stalked off and lowered himself into a chair, firearm in hand and eyes never missing a single one of Erwin's movements as he unwrapped his hand. 

"Get a look, Mob," Hange said as Erwin unwound the gauze. "I thought about throwing him overboard too, but I don't know that I'd tell just anyone about something like this."

He let the strip fall to a table and Hange crowded him instantly, twisting his hand this way and that. They dragged an oil lamp closer. Even Moblit inched forward to get a look.

Hange frowned. "But it was getting better. Why is it like this? It hasn't healed right."

Erwin smiled grimly. The growth on his hand throbbed unpleasantly where the oil had struck him. "It never does."

"How-"

"An overreaction."

"Is this norm- Smith, it looks cancerous."

"I wouldn't know. Only that it's always confined to the site of the original trauma."

Hange looked him up and down. "But you'd fought. You've had wounds. You should be one giant lump."

"I cut them off."

"Don't they grow back?

"Yes."

"Then you..."

"Cut them again."

"Until...?"

"Until they stop. Until the site is deadened. Temporarily. I think. In any case, it heals properly after a few, ah, false starts."

"You know, you do sound like you haven't been to a doctor in a hundred years."

"Would you, if the popular prescription was a noose?"

Hange hummed. "Maybe not."

The two helped him remove the growth and cauterize the wound. He bit into a spare cloth to quiet himself because now the pain would come as if to make up for the original burn tenfold. He bore the rest with no little practice: ringing in his ears as if he'd placed it to a thousand firing canons. Vision whitened as if eyes were plucked and dropped in milk. Hange's eyes charted every escaped sound, every pained line in his brow. 

When he was of a sound enough mind for it, Hange barraged him with questions, not least of which were of how their ancestor had come to treat him. Erwin mined his memories and relayed all he could. The porthole became an open window. The ever-present chemical odor gave way to the bitter and sweet and sour scents of medicinal herbs and flowers in gated gardens. An old man tuts.  _Dry your tears, boy._  

Moblit recorded his words and Hange paused their questioning every now and again to amend his notes. Erwin watched them. They worked well together. He glanced at his hand, jaw strained at the sting of it. He would need to cut it at least twice more before the growth ceased. The pain never lessened. He could swear it even grew.

He could not have convinced them without the demonstration. Hange believed him now, and Moblit, though unforgiving of his secrecy, followed their lead. Earning their trust so soon after slighting it was no small thing. He only hoped their questioning would rest before he needed to attend to a consequence of his showmanship that he wasn't as keen to reveal.

Hange prodded him and grumbled once or twice that they wished they'd brought this or that equipment aboard to measure his responses properly. Erwin strode to the porthole window. The sea churned as pens flew over parchment.

"Why now?" Hange said suddenly. One pen no longer moved. 

Erwin didn't turn. "A man once showed me herbs and plants and spirits which could mitigate the symptoms. I've told you all I know of them. Which ones helped and which didn't. I want to know if I can abolish this curse entirely-"

"I don't follow. Aside from that...enthusiastic immune response, anyone would kill for the other half of the deal. Endurance, slow to hunger, resistance to heat, to cold, disease, venoms - cannot wait to test all that-" Hange stopped. When Erwin finally turned, they were closer than before. 

"You mentioned something," Hange said, lower. Moblit's pen slowed behind them. "Before, you said that after one of these," Hange nodded to his hand, "incidents, all the regrowing and chopping and pain exhausts you. That you'd sleep for days if the trauma was grave enough."

"I imagine that would be true of anyone."

"Then, you said you'd get cravings."

"Likewise."

"For what?"

Erwin opened his mouth, but he hesitated a moment too long.

Hange pushed. "For what?"

Moblit's pen stopped. Erwin opened his mouth, shut it. He couldn't will his throat to work. 

Hange turned and, without word or warning, dragged Moblit to the door and shut him out. Erwin watched them return to him, bemused.

"You just went sheet white," Hange said. "So I'm guessing it isn't pie. Or anything Mob might approve of."

Erwin could only shake his head with a small smile, gone as soon as it came.

"Meat," he lied.

"Oh."

"Raw meat."

"Ah." Hange was more intrigued with this addition, eyes glazing as their mind raced. It was a half truth. If Hange figured him out, Erwin could play the fool and insist that he'd not been the wiser. But he knew. It was always blood. It was only blood.

Only in his youth was he unsure. For the longest time, he thought it normal to want to eat meat so rare it hardly touched the flame and yet never enjoy it unless it oozed. Unless his maw stained red as if he'd dove into a carcass whose heart still beat its last. Only when, still a boy, he'd thought to open his own wrists and nearly lost consciousness from the concentrated pleasure of it did he understand that he was not right.

He left Hange to their ruminating after arranging a time for daily appointments. His chilled skin numbed further when he reached the wind-lashed deck. He rested his elbows against peeling bulwark and let the spray whip and lash him. He shook. He never shook like this.

The spray lashed away the instinct to end the research, to insist that it was all theater. Silence them, if necessary. Years of rehearsing this exchange, of orchestrating this meeting, could be undone in one fit of panic. Revealing himself was less the ripping of a bandage than striking irons into his skull and prying it apart. 

He would not have opened his mouth not ten years ago. Men were hanged for far less. But the world was changing. The vampire is now a thing of penny dreadfuls. How he loved the form and all who fed it for relegating the beast to the realm of pixies and merfolk.

Evening chill burned his fingers. He was no vampire. If he was, he was sorely unfaithful to his literary kin. His reflection remained loyal. He preferred garlic in his bread. Not that details mattered when his lifespan remained titanic, when he could smell a papercut from another building if the wind was favorable. 

He neglected, too, to tell Hange the extent of the cravings. He didn't say how he forced himself, for years, to suck and gnaw at soured, coagulated blood from hares and wolves left to rot and leak, how he stored rotten fish and drained them in a locked storeroom in the hold every night of this voyage and every other to try - God, how he tried - to defeat the bloodthirst by association with death and rot and disease. He didn't mention that one flushed, bared neck would undo all his work. One splinter. One bitten lip. Not that details mattered.

He'd revealed more of himself tonight than to anyone in all his stolen years and yet his bones ached as if each suffered a blow. His chest hollowed yet weighed so heavy that if he gave himself to the sea at that moment, he would sink to its very bottom. Another reality had risen from the old once he'd said the words aloud to another. Not another soul could know. Not the captain nor the crew nor especially a certain distrustful, obstinate man. 

That night, he cut the second coming of the growth and treated the reopened wound. His hair stuck to his damp forehead. He pressed it to the porthole in his cabin as he waited out the waves of pain, as he watched the sea toy with their little boat. The lamp oil had hardly stung, yet any cut by his own hand strangled his nerves tenfold as if in retaliation. When the pain abated, men's and women's hearts sang as if his ear were to all their chests at once. Already, the disparate beats rose and clashed, growing more difficult to differentiate as one might not easily find the voice of one in a million-man march. In two more cuts, he would hear the rats. He would hear blood course through a passing albatross. Through a lost whale.

The hands that trimmed his own flesh changed the sheets of their first patient's bed. A fever throttled the man as the cart of medical equipment rattled beside them at the whims of the sea. Erwin spoke to him as they waited for the doctor. He regaled him with his travels, with bright festivals in Rome as night blackened the porthole. With the beautiful coats and frocks of men and women in Vienna as the man and his family's lone suitcase that held all they had slid across the room with one of the ship's groaning bows. 

It would have been a cruel theme if Erwin hadn't known how the man enjoyed the stories, how his eyes shined not with fever but fondness. He and his wife had traveled, too.

Erwin smoothed his hair from his forehead. "It's a hurricane of a city. The music they make, the things they write - when you're well, I'll bring photographs." The man smiled weakly. "Nida tells me you used to paint - I must show you Oskar's portraits. Not a thing like the stiff, polished works that clutter national galleries." Erwin turned the man as he began to cough and brought a damp cloth to his bloodied mouth, thanking the devil again that sickened blood did not stir his own. "He paints his subjects not as they appear but as they are." 

The man curled his hand and raised a pointed finger with what little strength he had to point at his own chest. Erwin smiled. "You would look as ghoulish as anyone in his hand," he said to the man's soft, wheezing laugh. He blinked lazily, mouth slackened but his eyes laughing still. Erwin paled. "Irfan," he called to him to little response. In all his talking, Erwin had distracted not only the man from his pain but himself from observing his too-faint heart.

"Nida-" He turned, about to implore his wife to seek the doctor and hurry his step, when, shedding his coat behind him, came the man himself.

 


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi: seitsensarvi  
> Erwin: 35g

Levi held the name in his mouth. When Erwin was gone, following the young-looking man with shaking hands, all hurry, he repeated it quietly.

Then he said it aloud when he entered the crew quarters, having not forgotten that he had been offered access to the officers’ areas if he so wished. He wouldn’t have passed half the opportunity.

A man stood before the first door, as if waiting for him. He held out a hand.

“Ackerman, is that right?”

He had not passed the threshold when Nanaba’s head peeked from the back of the room, surprised, before she rejoined them to offer introductions.

“This is Eld, the ship’s second junior – already off shift? – Eld, this is, apparently, doctor Ackerman.” She smiled. “I can show you around. Erwin said you’d probably come.”

She gestured to a cabin boy, who disappeared with a nod. Levi wondered what other things the man could have said, how much he knew, himself, and hoped it would amount to little else but his name. He didn't entirely believe it.

"I must say I doubted it could be you, of all people,” the surgeon went on, “Erwin’s physician.”

They passed the wardroom. Levi forced a smile.

“Not so literally. Only for a while.”

Levi did not know how much he should reveal of the assignment he had agreed to.Nanaba might not have known. Or she could have been his official replacement, and be considering her options so as to carry out an entirely different kind of unpleasant task, had he refused.

“Smith said he wasn’t an officer.”

“He might as well be. He really lacks only the name.”

“Couldn’t tell. It just strikes me as uncommon that a ship this size would rely on outsiders.”

“Never had a reason not to. The captain trusts him. I trust the captain. Erwin is a proper man.”

“It’s as simple as that?”

“No, doctor, it's never as simple as that, but you must understand. The captain has trusted him for seven years now.”

The argument was compelling. The captain wasn’t available this evening, Eld said, nor any other evening this week or rarely for more than a handful of minutes at a time, he added as if for emphasis – not that Levi had expected the shipmaster’s agenda to be any lighter -, but if it could be arranged, he would be glad to meet him at a later date.

Levi had become the sole depositor of the Maria’s safety not an hour prior. It was as if all of the confidence placed in Erwin had then been transferred to him, little to no questions asked. He might have been doubtful, by default, might have been difficult to convince but he would not neglect a single part of his duty.

The doctor told Eld he, too, would be glad to meet the captain.

Nanaba introduced him to several other officers as they came in bringing daily reports, and a chief engineer,  rapidly returning to his watch. In between, she told him about her work aboard; how any passenger could call on her, day and night, the kind of ailments she cured, the ones she most often encountered. It sounded like conversation. Levi saw it for the careful advice it really was.

Finally, she led them to the captain’s most impressively stocked library, looking satisfied.

When Levi rejoined his cabin, favoring the longer path that cut through the promenade deck just as every other night, he paused for a little while and watched black ink come alive. The waves crashed on the hull, over the railing, in a humbling display of the force of the sea. The ocean roared. He let the seconds fall, unnoticed, feeling more at peace than he had been the entire evening.

The bathroom door's lock was susceptible as always. Surrounded by the sea, amidst it, the weak running water felt too tame. Ice cold flowed weakly, washing away the day and silencing the noise of insistent thoughts about the work ahead, and still the merciful bite wouldn’t entirely erase the memory of a hand, its weight ghosting over the middle of the doctor’s back.  

The night was short. Levi was used to short nights. This one was shorter.

He arrived to the cabin-turned-office twenty minutes ahead of schedule and, looking over the laying man at once, his ashen face and ragged breathing, understood he was several weeks late.

The patient attempted a sound, coughed on it. Levi raised a hand. A man in his state needed not try to speak. He tied a cloth over his mouth and gestured to the observers to step away. He knelt, passing but the tips of his fingers over a throat, a chest, painted red; observed tears pool in unfocused eyes. The pulse was faint when he laid his hand on a wrist. The stethoscope – not his own –  spoke to his ears in quiet rasps, as if pained.

There were two pairs of eyes on him, watching his every move. Beside the bed, Erwin observed but didn’t utter a word. He could not have known the suffering man for long. He was there nonetheless.

Levi turned to the heaviest gaze still, the woman at his left, the wife, he guessed, and asked her how they had known the illness to start. She shivered. He insisted. What had hurt first. What had hurt most.

“You won’t bleed him, will you?”

“He doesn’t need less blood. If anything, he needs more.”

“How do you do that?”

“I don’t. There isn’t a way.”

He did not add, “Not here.”

“Then what can you…”

She did not finish. Gentler, Levi asked for their names.

“Smith, hand me the case.”

He ordered the man without realizing, force of habit rapidly coming back and no one else to assist him. He paused, struck, yet did not have to wait more than a second before he could fetch his notebook and pen. He wrote down the symptoms and listed the aches to keep a record, the effort entirely unnecessary, for he knew them all by heart. The familiarity failed to make them comforting.

The man needed sunlight. He would have to be moved from the steerage midship, its lack of air and space. Levi was aware of ship dispositions and, no matter the captain’s will, the more modest of the passengers would be assigned to stay below the level of the sea. It was notorious for strengthening every illness, and for doing so quickly; for spreading it, faster.

The man also needed a remedy. There was little to be done in the best sanatoriums of Europe, and even less at sea. Ample rest, a regular glass of milk. It was not a remedy.

Levi gestured to Erwin to have a word. His eyes darted back to the couple on the bed, her shaking hands passing through dark curls, his erratic breathing, the both desynchronized.

“It’s not pneumonia.” His own voice was rougher than he’d thought. It left but one illness with similar failing lungs, comparable weaknesses.. He saw on Erwin’s face that the man had expected the same.

“The good news would be, I don’t think he contracted it on board. Evolves too slowly, been gone too little time. But if we quarantine him – possibly her too – and there’s another case, even just one…”

He would have wished to avoid the possibility altogether.

“I need to see the rest of those you said were coughing blood,” he went on, urging, “Today.”

A well-known, controlled fear was coursing through his veins. Before he returned to his examination, and the sensible matter of announcing thin chances of recovery, he added, “And for God’s sake, don’t stay so close to the ill. You’ll catch something.”

 

-

 

Erwin obeyed the order, and many after. He filed away a thought to pursue an assistant for the doctor, but as they moved from one patient to another, he didn't only tolerate but covet the position that fell to him out of necessity. Not for its glamour - if there was any to be had in changing sheets and sterilization - and not strictly for the goodwill it earned among the passengers to put a face to his reputation and actions to his words, which soon should spread by wagging tongue and begin to earn the guarded trust of the less fortunate housed in the lower decks. No, it was observing the doctor that most rewarded his efforts. 

Though reluctant to know doctors from a patient's chair, he'd counted more than a few among his acquaintances and even friends. He'd never known one like him. In one moment, deaf to all the world but his own devices as he listened to bodies' woes and drafted observations in his impeccable script, and in another, descended from his imperial severity to whisper good, soft things to dying men.

The madman - though Erwin thought it fondly - saw their most troubled patients, and then some, in a single night, though the definition stretched when dawn greeted them and early risers made travel between cabins difficult when medical equipment rattled after them and the touch of death clung to the threads of their jackets and the cuffs of their sleeves. It took even the appearance of something amiss to drown a ship in idle gossip. 

Erwin stopped the doctor in a less frequented corridor before the man could transport them to their destination by the stone force of his will alone. 

"Wait, Doctor Ackerman." He pulled him to a stop with a loose grip on his arm, relieved that the man's heart barely ticked at the motion, having grown tolerant of his presence in their first breakneck shift.

"Much as I'm thrilled to break a baker's dozen in a night, we need to pace ourselves." 

He spoke over the fight in the man's shadowed eyes. "You need rest. We've long since seen to our most critical patients. I must see the captain to the issue of quarantine and prepare a pretty penny for the quartermaster if we want lodgings for our less fortune with proper ventilation. And with, I suppose," he teased on a whim, "your dear sunlight."

 

-

 

Levi was taken aback. He hadn't thought of tracking the time. He would have went on without hesitation, until every listed name had obtained a corresponding line of observations in his book or every muscle in his body ached from the strain, whichever came first. He tended to forget, driven that he was then, duty and dread uncaring for the passing of days.

The passengers most in danger themselves and, especially, for others, had been attended to as best as could be with limited means. Some of those spared by contagious illnesses had wished to go back to their own, preferring not to be bound to their deathbed when they had family still needing their care. He couldn't say if the child they'd seen last would make it through the morning, all of her small limbs trembling in cold, tiny fingers pink. He noted to come back and check on her before long.

“Sunlight is essential in many of the ailments I cure, Smith. Have you ever noticed how one's mood will drop in its absence? Not only the mood. Health as well.”

The doctor would have, for once, wished not to be left with only his thoughts, the urgency stilling only to leave one constant reminder in its wake. There was no avoiding the persistent memory of a home made sick house made grave; not his own he'd decided, never his own. It had become his own again. He considered his options, limited.

“Which is why I'd like to pay a visit to the good people down below.” The man raised a questioning eyebrow at that, so he added, “When we're done.” The eyebrow went up and only then did he concede, “Not today.”

He hadn't expected that Erwin would stay for a single visit, much less through every last one of them. He'd completed every request, received every thought on the most worrisome diagnoses with composed grace. One entire night and the man barely looked worn out, nothing about him betraying the many hours just spent save for a few stray strands of hair, slightly amiss across a finely carved face. It softened his looks, only just.

Levi averted his gaze and it fell on a still wrapped hand. He would have wanted to see the wound, simply to be sure. For all the commonness of such a request on his part, he hadn't inquired.

“Does that mean I shall leave you the entire pleasure of announcing the worst cases to the captain,” he asked instead, “Right away?”

The doctor wondered if he should perhaps be ready to counter the answer with medical concerns of his own, and order that the man also have his rest. He suppressed a yawn that still watered his eyes. He was exhausted.

  



	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi: seitsensarvi  
> Erwin: 35g

 

"Would that I could introduce you in better circumstances. Either way," Erwin said, "better that the captain is unaware of finer details. Officially - legally -" he said, drawing closer to his ear, "neither he nor any of the crew know a thing about this project."

Erwin meant to draw away. He couldn't. 

He only intended to move closer to dissuade prying ears and eyes. His lips hovered by the doctor's ear, by a cheek ruddy with exertion. There was no sick blood between them now, nothing but an open neck and a wound on his hand demanding of him the sort of iron strength he wouldn't find in food or rest. 

"I hope you understand," he said after one moment too many had passed. He turned as soon as he drew away, not trusting himself to even look at the man again, and promised the doctor his company when they resumed their work that night. 

Erwin flew across the deck, locked himself in his cabin and sliced off the renewed growth. He came to in an undignified, crumpled heap against the wall in a cold sweat with blood in his mouth from the work of his animal maw on his own lip. 

The hunger shouldn't have returned this quickly. When he was like this, sucking on rotten fish wouldn't quell it for an hour, if that. He'd never before touched his private - emergency - reserves so soon after leaving shore. He'd never so seriously scalded himself aboard before, either, though he thought he'd made peace with the necessity of that. He should be able to allow himself the indulgence - no, the necessity. He stood on unsteady feet, wrapped his hand, and licked his reddened lip. Even as he headed for medical storage, he couldn't not feel himself less disciplined for it.

He salvaged what little dignity remained with him when he succeeded in waiting until the cooled - human - blood was safely in a flask before he allowed himself a drop. Just the one and his bones melted, his skin flushed. The wound would now need slicing not one but two or three times more and he would double it if it meant never losing himself like he had in front of the doctor again. 

"Erwin?"

He pocketed the flask and emerged to his surgeon's wandering eye. 

"Late night?" She asked innocently.

He smiled and headed for the bridge with her at his heels. "Whatever gave you the idea?"

"Your sheet face, for one," she said. She dropped the act. "That bad?"

"Manageable," Erwin said diplomatically.

"Got it," she muttered, wise by then to the difference between what he said and what he meant.

"We're in good order," he said. They passed a group of dock hands. "We covered half a deck."

She pulled ahead to match his large stride. "No."

"Yes. Every symptom observed, measured and noted in moments. The man's a storm."

"Lucky, that. Who assisted?"

They crossed into the sunlit bridge. Erwin strode behind her wherever the rays thickened. "I did."

"All night? Not bad," she teased as she helped him look for the captain. "Though I'm sure you're needed elsewhere. I'd lend him Miss Ral - getting a little bored with the upper-deckers requesting her to moan about a wart - might do her good. Off the record, obviously."

"Of course," Erwin said distantly, though he knew immediately that it would be for the best. He would have more time to introduce himself to the lower decks and mingle in their corners to suss out any illness he couldn't thread out of a beating heart.

He would also see less of the doctor, which filled him with equal parts relief and remorse. Surely, they would meet again to coordinate and inform one another of their respective progress. His control wouldn't be whittled again by long, demanding nights. But how satisfying it was to follow intelligent orders, to be made properly useful by a good man. 

They'd known one another properly for a single day. It should have been premature to make such a judgment. Erwin was no stranger to men with masked faces and veiled words, but he sensed none of it in the doctor, nothing but a love of man beneath a callous hewn from the blows of a churning world.

They found the captain in heated debate with the chief navigator. He excused himself as soon as he saw them, face ashen, and in retrospect, Erwin should have known what it looked like for the head surgeon and himself to bound toward him like they did. 

"Office," he said, before either could speak.

When the lock turned, he spoke again before them, this time to Erwin alone. "Yes or no. Far gone?"

"No."

Mike sank into a chair. Shadows pooled under his eyes. "Swell. I'll leave you to it."

Nan cleared her throat. "Speaking of swells-"

"Right," Mike said, then, to Erwin, "I'm sure you've noticed a little listing now and again."

"Nothing out of the ordinary."

Mike ran a hand through already thoroughly unruly hair. "Yet. We're skirting this son of a bitch best we can, but I'm not in the mood for another 98."

Nan frowned.

"We were tossed that year, too," Erwin explained to her. "You missed that trip to attend a medical summit."

"What happened, then?"

"Food stores contaminated," Mike said. "Everything and the kitchen sink overboard. We had two, three militias among the passengers by the time we reached land."

"Don't exaggerate," Erwin said.

"Don't undersell. Not everyone's as dandy as you with a barrel in our eyes."

Erwin considered for a fraught moment whether Mike somehow knew about Moblit's theatrics the other day, though surely there was no need for innuendo between them. That, or maybe he'd just proved Mike's point for him.

"What do you need?" Erwin asked instead.

"I'm having the crew check every last bolt," Mike said and stood, and paced. "If we can keep skirting this thing, great. If not, I don't want a single line of rope where it shouldn't be. Already, I'm hearing for the first time about less than perfect hull integrity and jury-rigged cylinder valves and-"

"That's enough," Nan said and turned him around. "Before your face becomes a proper raspberry." 

He dragged at his face as if that would swipe the red from it. It humbled Erwin, still, that the captain, cool and untroubled to any wandering eye, let only them see him so. It must feel freeing.

"My people are sitting on their thumbs anyhow," Nan said as she pushed Mike back into his seat. "We'll assist."

"The passengers can't know," Mike said. "One provocateur and the whole ship could be up in a froth. Off-duty nurses inspecting life rafts in the light of day's not gonna win us a lot of confidence."

"Nothing a few well-timed events in the salons can't solve," Erwin said.

The captain fell silent, considering them both. He let Nanaba take off his scarf. Erwin didn't miss the fond hand that smoothed his collar into place.

They left the captain to the navigators that hounded him at his door. Mike arranged the rooms Erwin needed with the quartermaster without question. Erwin calculated - optimistically - when the doctor would wake from his rest and informed Nanaba when it would be best to send Miss Ral to offer her assistance. Though they seldom crossed paths, she was an affable and competent professional and he doubted she would give the man any trouble. Involving another in their project, however briefly, wasn't ideal. Neither was mutiny.

His hand stung. He allowed himself another drop from his flask when they parted, and when he was sure the corridor was empty. Erwin loathed reneging on a promise, and would have preferred to introduce them himself, but between sitting for Hange's examinations and coordinating artful distractions for their passengers, he doubted that he could allow himself a proper meal.

Not that he needed one nearly as often as his peers. He'd informed Hange that his personal best was two weeks without any noticeable cognitive or bodily upsets, and he was sure it would be one of the first trials that waited for him ashore by the gleam in their eye. 

It was the motion of it that comforted him. The pretense of it. For the same reason, he slept though he needed it far less. Even when restless, he kept to a bed with a notebook or a novel and played an insomniac as he'd play a connoisseur with all food and drink even as all but one tasted all the same, tasted like nothing at all. 

He sat for Hange's observations and organized a night of dancing for society ladies and gentlemen before descending to the lower decks to join card games and let a girl with a red scarf read to him, all the while spinning yarns to the cold and the paperless and the fearful of an angel of a doctor.   


-

  
Levi settled back in the lulling embrace of tiredness, only to feel air catch in his throat when his distance to the man closed to that of a breath.

He wouldn't have taken Erwin to be one to fancy physical closeness, not especially. If not for the fingers on his arm. If not for the warmth of a hand, hovering near to his back. The doctor watched the corridor until it was empty again, ears following the rattling of the cart and waiting for an occasional stranger to disappear out of sight, then several full, long seconds after that. The shy, early sun's rays had turned bright white.

The man was a mystery. Whenever there, his attention was entirely Levi's as he demanded it; sometimes, when he didn't, still his, subtler. Then, the very next moment, gone. Levi was used to some particular brand of secrecy for the careful crafting of his own, for holding in high respect every of his patient's. If he wouldn't admit to himself that he looked forward to their next shift, he could at least confess the enjoyment he found in uncovering an enigma.

The singular taste of ill health had come back with the very first visit of the day, hanging in the air and clinging to his steps like an old demanding friend — his, and every doctor's. Levi spent precious minutes washing it from his hair, his nails, the crease of his eyes. He welcomed sleep like a thirsty man would water, drinking all too fast, and considered thanking every god, familiar and foreign, that he didn't dream at all.

The sun was higher in the sky and himself just about dressed when Levi heard the now-familiar clatter of metal, followed by a brief knock on his door. Instead of the expected steady build and steadier eyes, he stepped out of his cabin to the serious face of a very young woman.

“Miss Ral, doctor, Petra. The surgeon sent me to assist you today.”

“Smith's still asleep?” He smirked to conceal the shadow of disappointment. It wouldn't do to worry about the man just now. He wondered nonetheless.

“I wouldn't know, sir. But chief Nanaba would have me tell you she made sure to change every used cloth. And I sanitized the equipment in advance.” She paused. “Twice.”

The girl's eagerness reminded him of another. She would have been barely older.

They covered a little less than the second half of the deck that afternoon, the wide array of sicknesses less critical than those of the day before and, in that, requiring substantially more time to identify. Petra was earnest in her work and knew the minutia of a ship doctor's task much better than himself.She hadn't scoffed at his antics, the occasional roughness to him not the worst of them, when he knew many others would have.

She was skilled. She was not Erwin. It was nothing like operating with Erwin. Levi wondered why he so insisted on evading the thought.

At the end of their shift — this one timed, the doctor requested that they go for one additional visit, off-schedule. It wasn't that he ever missed the sight of men holding onto the last of their strength with weakening grips. Rather, he had missed his own usefulness in being able to cure, to help; in being able to relieve some of the pain, sometimes all. He didn't feel especially useful when, true to his word, he came back to one specific door, the cabin behind it stuffed and small.

Levi marked the date of the first death of the voyage. He would have wished to hope the last, quickly dismissed the lie. The girl's mother had been waiting for him, not knowing who else to address, fearful of being asked. She told him at length how her daughter had been too frail, always, how she had done nothing but pray even though she'd known, as soon as they had embarked, deep in her bones. Levi listened, recognizing how in reassuring him she was attempting to console herself. Before they left, she took his hands, then Petra's, in her tanned, creased ones, and through her tears thanked them for coming at all.

The evening, then well-advanced, saw the doctor send his assistant back with his own thanks and ask that she speak to the surgeon or the captain as how to better arrange the funeral. He couldn't precisely tell how those were processed at sea, having never witnessed one. In his mind, the small body fell, swallowed by unforgiving waves.

Even this late, Levi had no hunger to him at all. He erred through overcrowded halls, under flickering lights, chancing glances in case his eyes meet a familiar silhouette. There was none in sight. Reading over the day's notes, he found he could assign a face to each name, and a sickness to each face. He estimated the pace of recovery of those he had prescribed cures to, so as to check on them at appropriate times. He also estimated dates for the few who hadn't.

The doctor had avoided explaining the cases to Ral in significant detail. She very well knew why an unknown physician would knock on the poorest's doors, offering his time and the ship's supplies. Still, Levi hadn't forgotten one elusive man asking that he report to no one but him. 

 

He looked for Erwin now, feeling the itch of mild irritation gradually coming back. The man was nowhere to be seen, and the ship considerably too vast. Levi stopped by a familiar library instead of furthering his aimless pacing, welcoming the quiet there, organizing his mind, and wondered if he would get to deliver the day's observations to an interlocutor livelier than blank pages before the end of the night.

 


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi: seitsensarvi  
> Erwin: 35g

 

Erwin screamed into the rag. The growth fell again, soon to join its previous incarnations in the sea. His lips burned for the cool mouth of the flask, his tongue for iron. This wasn't working. What little blood he allowed himself to stave off the hunger, barely enough to wet his lips, was feeding, too, the friendly cancer lapping at his hand. To end the growths, he needed to starve. 

To starve, he couldn't stay awake. 

He traced the loose boards from where he'd seated himself and pressed his back against the wall. He allowed himself only this cabin whenever he boarded the Maria. He'd never needed that space he'd once built beneath the floorboards. One part bed, one part tomb. A timed mechanism to let in slivers of light at the appropriate time to wake him. 

His hand tightened on the flask, cap untouched. How drastic it all sounded, yet he'd slept in just this way on land when an injury refused to properly close. But those had been grave wounds, wartime wounds. Not now. Not today. He could wait. And he would have the most convenient excuse.

It would be nothing at all to convince the captain that he came down with fever from his proximity with the ill. Hange would have an opportunity to observe him in this state, even to offer solutions he'd never considered. The doctor needed only a few days more to service the rest of the ship if their first night was any indication of his enthusiasm. He wouldn't need him after that.

The doctor. Erwin rose on unsteady legs and tucked the flask into his jacket. His shift would have ended by then, provided he didn't blow right past it again.

How sharp the man's eyes were, Erwin thought as he retraced his steps to find him. How keenly aware he was of the gauze on his hand from the moment they'd properly met. He lowered his sleeve and for once cursed that it was tailored so well as to come up well short of keeping the wrapping hidden. 

How his hand burned, as if growing angrier with each successive tampering. Heartbeats melted together without rhythm, cacophonous. His hands shook. He couldn't imagine the pallor in his face. Erwin considered the laudanum in the ship's stores and just as swiftly refused the idea. He needed to feel this.

It took much longer to locate the doctor's beat, and for the last time, he considered the flask in his jacket before refusing it, too. The pallor, he could blame on any old thing, not least the chill spilling into the ship from the beckoning arms of their neighboring storm. But a flush was indicative of one thing only, one direly unprofessional thing. He could not give the doctor reason to distrust him, to think he would steal away not in the captain's name but for that of a bottle.

He would bear it as he bore far worse. It lightened him a touch to consider that all this hair-raising worry was over, as ever, a meeting with a doctor.

Erwin tugged on his sleeve once more before entering the library and spotting the man immediately at his favorite haunt: a corner by a window from which was visible nearly all the library and a great amount of the hallway.

The doctor did not look up immediately, but Erwin knew by the sudden restlessness in his pen-twirling, page-pinching hands that he knew well enough who approached him.

"Evening, doctor," he said as he seated himself opposite him. He kept his burning hand on his lap and blessedly out of sight with the table between them. Candlelit flicker painted his face warm and his lips full. The flame danced in his eyes.

"I apologize for earlier - I hope my sudden replacement didn't slow your work. I'm sure, though, Miss Ral has quite a bit more experience in this field than I. But you're a busy man," Erwin said. "I won't trouble you for anything but a written report. As soon as you're able," he added, and moved as if to begin to stand, hoping for nothing but a simple affirmation from the man before the paper cut curling around the rounded, pink tip of his left ring finger snapped his spine from how he held himself from ripping it off his hand. 

  
-  


The doctor saw Erwin come near, the form now familiar even from the corner of his eye. He listened to muffled steps, sensed him stop and briefly dim the light. Levi had been waiting, thinking of what to ask to satisfy some measure of his curiosity, only to understand that he wouldn't be granted the privilege at all. The man had barely sat down that he was already rising to leave. It was not what he'd planned.

“We're burying a child tonight.”

He spoke for Erwin's ears only, quietly, as if removed. His eyes remained down, not leaving the pages.

“Though of course, I don't know if we can properly call it a burial.”

He reveled in the silence, the absence of any movement, be it slight.

“You should have seen her. Two, three years old. A tiny body, so fragile. Wonder what it's like, seeing your infant daughter thrown overboard like a log of wood.”

He thought of weights attached to small feet so that the body wouldn't float, wouldn't stay on the ocean's surface to torment the deck's passerbys. He thought of the mother's grief and it should have been heavy enough to sink them both, unbearable. 

He lifted his eyes.

“I'm not playing secretaries, Smith.”

Levi wouldn't have minded. He was used to writing reports, having completed his fair share and taught budding doctors under him how to precisely render a diagnosis. The wide array of terms used to describe a bruised skin, a labored breathing. The precision in dosages. The formality in declaring death, so far removed from reality, just the one final, loud, so terribly loud line. He'd written more than he could count. He had counted at first, young, as if it would change a thing. The bodies he remembered, for they never truly left. He hadn't allowed himself to hold onto numbers on top of the images.

He wouldn't have minded, yet he also remembered all too well the man's flowing phrases, talking at length about the both of them, honest, the both of them as equals.

“No need to extend your own situation to me, even though I appreciate the concern. I'm not that busy a man. Unlike you, I'm guessing, from the whole not showing up thing.”

If the doctor had intended to ask Erwin, he hadn't thought of pushing it so far. Not until he'd seen him, face ashen white even in the warm candle's light. Then the words had come out harsh. He watched blue eyes observe him under brows drawn tight. Erwin was properly seated again now, Levi's tone sufficient to cause a halt.

He rigorously begun reporting the day's consultations with not half a mind for repayment. He started with endangered lives, thankful that they were very few, easily identifiable. Then the rest, trickier sometimes. This woman was bedridden with a cold, entirely manageable. This boy's skin was covered in rashes but it didn't look like a bug's bite at all. He thought there might be some, still; there always were some, they would need to watch.

He insisted that the man's attention be on him the whole time, Levi's own entirely his to match. If not for the information strictly, then to observe a shiver, to catch the first gleam of sweat or a fevered sigh. Erwin hadn't come this morning. Hadn't planned to stay this night. How innocently it seemed that he would attempt to fool a doctor's eye. 

 

-

  
Erwin did not expect such depth of feeling from the man for a child he'd not even known before that night. He himself had been one of nearly a dozen siblings, half of whom he'd buried himself when their little hands could only barely close around his littlest finger. He'd forgotten, still, how far medicine has come, how much more a lost child meant now than what was, in his youth, comparable with the loss of a workhorse or an obedient dog. 

His attention was not so much given as it was snared. He listened with sweat beading at his brow, and with a hand that burned far past when it should have lessened to a tolerable throb. Still, his eye was level with Ackerman's and he betrayed nothing that the flicker of a few flames could not shroud. 

How he hated and loved the man in equal measure for how pristinely he went about his assignment even as he used the occasion of this report to observe every line in Erwin's face without a care that Erwin knew it. 

He let him look. Erwin bit his tongue and tasted iron as he looked him in the eye and when the doctor had his say, he, in turn, reported which unfilled upper cabins the quartermaster had made available to them at Erwin's insistence, and invited the doctor to tour them when he was able. It was possible to comfortably place two or three of similar affliction in a single room, given their size. He informed him, too, of which daylight hours he could use to his advantage when most milling, wandering souls would wander into brimming salons and and bars instead.

Lastly, the minister. 

"I have a man in mind. I'll locate him today and double back to the mother to offer his services," Erwin said. "If it happens that he wouldn't be appropriate for some denominational reason, I'm sure a ship's officer would do. From then, it's..." 

Her face came to him, then. Blue eyes and fair hair. A nose curved, like his own. The box had hardly been shut before damp earth descended on it. Quick work. Unfeeling work. Not out of malice, no. He didn't remember malice. A desire to forget, maybe. To forge on.

Her name. He couldn't remember her name. 

The doctor waited.

"...it's a matter of whether the mother prefers a traditional funeral or a more private affair..."

She never had one. None of them were named until a certain age. Not until it was a sure thing that they would live. Not until it was safe to love them.

The thirst was a near forgotten thing now, only a tightness in his chest. He hadn't remembered these nameless sisters in a hundred years. Not like this. They should have felt like relics. Like fossil placards beneath sterile lights and museum glass. Yet he felt that hand on his finger, that unbearably small hand, as if it had touched him not a moment ago.

_You should have seen her._

"...and I'm sure one of our...one of our crewman could be tasked with making a...an appropriate, uh-" He let out a long-held breath. "Casket." 

Ada. The doctor had mentioned it in passing. It should be carved into the wood.

Erwin stood and offered the doctor his good hand as the sun rose. The flask pressed against his chest as he straightened. "Will you join me at the portside salon? It's never as peaceful as it is between night and day."

He hoped the doctor took it for the apology it was. Erwin may not get away with keeping him at a distance just yet.   


-

 

Levi relaxed in his chair, minutely. He watched not for the first time candlelight dance over refined features, near ghostly; and when at last he fell silent and the man spoke, he heard the resolve he'd sought. He'd understood the purpose. The doctor only demanded reliability. Erwin gave it.

He pondered over the suggestions, the ways of handling the funeral and guessed every concerned party would certainly prefer it remained private. Once over, the grieving mother would walk back downwards and disappear, robbed of a child, again nameless. There would be no one else to share the loss. She, alone, was given the task of mourning. Levi avoided sparing thoughts of what awaited those lonely souls, where they were headed; if they ever allowed themselves hope or if they forbid even the idea, asking for nothing but good fortune so the winds would only bring them there. For himself, he had not decided.

A pause troubled the man's voice then, unexpected. A stutter, a delay. An anomaly.

Levi had never heard him stumble over a word before, his speech ever so smooth and practised. It could have been merely tiredness, or a hint of distress, or pain. He couldn't tell. He filed the thought as he would a symptom, adding it to his list like it could give him the answer he chased. Levi wasn't done playing doctors, on and off duty; not when any single body could fall prey to just the wrong disease, not when the very man who asked that he cured the ill displayed the palest face, the darkest eyes, the slightest tremor in his hand.

“The captain knows. Couldn't find you to report, but you can bet I'm not leaving dead bodies to rot in cabins.”

His hand.

“A minister would be sensible. From there, I'm sure they can take care of it. A blessing, a prayer, whatever's needed.”

His other hand. He'd concealed it.

It could be the simplest infection. The fever soon gone, the heat then the chill. Levi could barely imagine that the man would have displayed such attention in sanitizing tools and inspecting bandages before they covered a patient's wound, only to forego treating his own with the same concern. It was impossible to tell without seeing the burn, still. Levi sensed the man unwilling to show, for all the care with which he'd avoided it.

“In these cases, as you know,” he did not wait for the man to confirm, “people hardly ever ask for more than dignity.”

If the doctor had had half a mind to call it a night at the prospect of morning coming close and a wish for the other to sleep — often the simplest remedy, he reconsidered at the gracious invitation he offered. The further observation it enabled. The questions it allowed. He did not admit, the company.

“I'll attend, probably.”

He could not think of any subject requiring more carefulness than a voyager's demise, doubted then that Erwin truly pursued privacy. He might have only wished to share the sight of the sun, his light so dear, breaking dawn on the distant line of the sea. They had walked past the sight but the day before, ever so quickly.

An apology.

Levi rose and, taken by a fancy, let his fingers fall over the man's offered ones, asking that he leads.  



	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi: seitsensarvi  
> Erwin: 35g

Erwin had expected a brief, solid grip, or none at all. He had been ready to watch the doctor rise without his hand, had already begun to lower it, offered without thought to the man's short tolerance for unnecessary gestures. 

The doctor's fingers skirted across his palm before coming to a rest, and nothing more. No grip at all, no move to rise. It was a moment before Erwin thought to close his own hand and pull the doctor to his feet, a motion he was more than familiar with anyone but him. 

His rise brought him closer to Erwin, apart by a breath. He neither stepped back nor moved past. His hand remained in Erwin's. Erwin's neck, in a wolf's jaws.

"As will I," Erwin said, almost whispered. "Probably."

He couldn't say whether it was he or the doctor who set the languid pace with which they made their way to the salon. He found it difficult to labor over the point as he usually would. The impulse to examine and calculate cooled to a barely-there simmer. He was content just to walk with him. To lay the night to rest with him. 

When they neared the entrance to the salon, Erwin placed his hand flush against the doctor's back to ensure that he turned into the correct hall. Only for a moment.

Once the barkeep drew the doctor's eye with a quick word about their collection, Erwin turned as if to adjust his jacket and indulged himself in his flask. Anything, he thought as he pocketed it, to quiet how the man's blood serenaded him, how the imagined promise of it lulled him. 

Yet when he returned to thank the barkeep and offer his own recommendations, it sang only sweeter. 

 

-

 

Levi eyed the wide array of dark, old bottles before his eyes. Perhaps it wouldn't be too much a folly to allow themselves the respite in the remaining hours of the night. Merely for a little while.

Brandy only ever evoked the daily prescriptions. He suspected the efficiency of those remedies laid less in the drink's properties than in the dulling of the mind, the temporary distraction. Whisky was entirely out of the question. There had been a time where he had enjoyed the fire of its liquid smoke before it had become, from necessity rather than by choice, an essential element in his doctor's case.

He missed the treat that was stronger liquor sometimes; the hazy mind he could not afford, would not inflict on himself for even the smallest sip tasted like hastily disinfected wounds, smelled of crudely anesthesized limbs.

He also missed the comforting warmth. He wondered, if he were to try again, whether it would burn whiter than the man's palm against his back.

“We could have something mild. Wine,” the doctor said to the barkeep, then glancing up to Erwin, “this once again, if you don't mind.”

Their walk had erased every sign he'd noted of the man's short-lived distress. From the corner of his eye, the doctor watched the ease with which Erwin kept only this one hand in sight, at all times. Such a flawless nature it was, he thought, if it dared be true, and how used he must have been to overlook his discomfort, so well practiced that Levi very nearly inquired whether sometimes he had not been able to tell that he felt pain at all.

Their drink served, Levi tipped his head just so to look at the man's face again, and raised his glass. “To the living,” he offered, low. The savor was pleasantly rich, soft like an embrace or a lazy night; far from raw enough to ever distract his nerves.

He turned away then, and wandered over to the lonely window pane cutting the adjacent wall. Beyond, not the faintest light. He had forgotten to check the time. The night felt eerily peaceful there, and he would have preferred not to disrupt it at all. When the footsteps following just a moment after his came to a halt, he spoke no louder.

“Erwin.”

They hadn't met so long ago as to warrant using the other's name, yet Levi allowed himself the familiarity, be it just this once. He didn't mind a concession to incivility for the sake of emphasis. He didn't mind the minute startle it earnt him, the way it rolled off his tongue. 

As rich, as soft as the wine. 

“Don't think I haven't noticed the trembling.”

 

-

 

Erwin raised his glass, complimented his choice, and followed him to grand windows facing open sea.

It couldn't have been the spot of blood on his tongue that lulled him to imagine how the doctor said his name, how he tasted it with his wine. 

And maybe he was a little relieved that the man pushed past his best maneuvers with all the ease of a needle through skin. He wouldn't even need to lie.  

Erwin invited him to a seat at one of two armchairs by the window. He pushed his own closer so as to lower his voice. Few others remained in the salon, fewer still in any state to detect anything but their own headaches, but no one ever suffered from being too careful.

"A rare skin condition." He laid his hand on the armrest. "If I remembered the name, I wouldn't be able to pronounce it. Flares up sometimes. Especially with an accidental cut or burn. Not contagious," he added. "And under control for many years. I admit I'm very self conscious of it."

He turned his hand and gave the ring-less ring finger a bob with a little smile. "Not quite as attractive as it is harmless."

The sea played on the doctor's face, palace of contradictions that it was. So near was Levi and so untroubled - he not once glanced to the exits since he'd entered - that Erwin's gaze roved over the harsh join of his brows and the delicate curve of his nose with unguarded contentment. The ship groaned. Their hearts slowed. 

"I should have known any attempt to hide would have caught your eye even faster," he teased. 

He took a sip of his wine. "Your turn," Erwin said. "What brings Levi Ackerman to America?"

 

-

 

“Tired of all this shit sunlight.”

Levi found he didn't mind the way the man spoke his name, either.

“Figured I could get myself a place right where we land. I've been told it's often dull. Cold. What's there not to like?”

Or the way his mouth curved into a smile.

“Also conveniently serves the purpose of holding those imperialist fucks off. You wouldn't imagine just how tenacious they are.”

The doctor very well knew he'd said at once not enough and far too much and, assuming Erwin would inquire, left it at that. In truth, he couldn't have cared less for the attractiveness of their destination, bringing onto its land every manner of dreaming, fleeing men. He only cared that it was far.

Levi watched realization dawn on fair features and found he could not imagine the skin disappearing under a collar, up under a sleeve to be anything other than perfect; untainted, unmarred. He needed not admit how he couldn't exactly place the man's condition, how it evoked nothing in particular. How he failed to picture it.

Still, he tried.

Still his eyes would inevitably fall back to Erwin's hands — the both of them, this time.

The ship leaned, ever so slight, and his own fingers unconsciously found the edge his glass. He'd almost forgotten about the wine.

 

-

 

Erwin hummed. "Cold, yes. Unrepentantly. But never dull. And I imagine imperials are-" He watched him take a drink. Maybe they had more in common than he imagined. "-quite similar across empires and oceans."

Nothing on him indicated the man's political ideology or faith. The omission was as much a confirmation as any. He wondered if the man's family remained. If they'd long since left. If Erwin's proposition was a welcome respite from something like loneliness. 

In a few days, it wouldn't matter. He wouldn't matter. Erwin couldn't divide his attention between their mobile clinic and his own treatment for longer than necessary. Not if he wanted significant progress. He would accompany the doctor on their rounds again when the not yet risen sun had set, and again the day after. The doctor will be a happier, wealthier man, and Erwin could return to being prodded night and day. If he concentrated, he could nearly convince himself look forward to it.

He regaled the man with the sights and sounds of their destination until the sun had properly risen and its rays crept uncomfortably close, avoiding the personal despite how dearly his curiosity needled him. Better that he knew little. Better that, after their brief business venture, the doctor forgot his name.

"Why?" Hange asked hours later, when their shuttered, candlelit cabin belied the scorching sun beyond it.

Erwin winced as they applied an experimental herbal solution to the wound, no smaller with all the blood he'd taken to keep his teeth safely behind his lips. 

Erwin hedged while he searched for the right words. It had taken no time at all for Hange to fill in all his half truths, not a full day before drafts of spiraling, twisting arteries filled their books. Even so, he'd need to wrest open his own throat to be able to say anything plainly.

"What comes to mind when I say bloodlust?"

"Not so good things," they said mildly as they spread it thick. "Lots of tearing and screaming."

His mouth moved silently before he could force his throat to work. He couldn't ignore it anymore, couldn't force it to the back of his mind as if that would condemn the truth itself to the ends of the earth. He'd tried desperately. He told himself it could be anything. Anything but this. 

"I can hear his heart."

 

"You hear loads of them, though? Remember, we had Moblit walk up and down the ship with a pot and a half of coffee in him? Anyway, eight meter radius average is very impressive, but I'm more interested in variations throughout the day - we've only measured three, but if we can repeat that for a full lunar cycle, we might-"

"He's at the stern. Above the Rose library."

Hange screwed the lid shut on their solution and placed it with uncharacteristic care into its rack. "That's not eight meters."

"Forty, at a guess."

Hange flipped open their notebook and took notes as Erwin described the rest. He described how gently the world turned when Levi was near. How moving apart ground his nerves into pulp. How he preferred boiling in oil over being near and yet not near enough to a stray papercut again. 

Privately, he wondered how he could have let it happen. Minor wounds on anyone else elicited nothing like this. The doctor was by no means careless, but sharp tools were sharp tools and long shifts were long shifts. Yet he was wholly indifferent to Hange and Moblit's myriad scrapes.

He couldn't see the man again. He would consign himself to his cabin for the rest of the voyage and pour lamp oil in his own eyes if it would convince him to stay away. 

"This is perfect," Hange said.

"What?"

"Have that handy for emergencies," they gestured to the flask he'd set on the table - far be it for Hange not to measure how many milligrams were taken, at which locations, and at what precise moments in the day before cross referencing wind patterns and the position of the moon - "and, uh, just have another drink with him now and then."

He only stared in disbelief. They were serious. 

"You want to use Levi as bait?"

"What happened to doctor this, doctor that? All of a sudden, it's 'Levi'? And would you rather we reach land and go through the ordeal of inducing this connection on purpose?" Hange asked, meeting his indignation with their own. "Would you prefer to knowingly pluck some poor thing off the street to wine and dine and throw away when we're done with them? Doing that to a dozen of them, a hundred, until we find another like him?"

Cold fury drained to make room for colder dread. He knew, however deeply he wanted to protest, that Hange was right. A tightly wound recollection of a repressed memory was no substitute for a concurrent record of everything from his blood pressure to his arithmetic to his dreams. It occurred to him, too, that, it made little difference to Hange's records which method they used. Doing it now would even disrupt other measurements and trials that relied on the consistency of all other variables. But it would not hang the weight of premeditation around his neck. Hange knew that. They knew him. 

The wound redressed, Erwin pocketed the flask and promised a committed answer by morning. 

"Hey, Erwin. Last time this, uh, this happened. Was it mutual? Was she affected, too, in any way?"

Erwin unraveled the memory for a moment longer. He passed his hand against the doorframe.

"Not that I ever knew," he said, and left to attend a funeral. 

 

-

 

The doctor navigated the lower floors as if they were both his home and his own design. He had become known to more of their inhabitants than he ever intended, and though he was mindful of his every footstep and still sometimes wished he could grow another pair of eyes to watch over his back, he couldn't quite resent the fact.

Instead, the honest, punishing uneasiness came when he caught himself at the turn of a corridor, first, thinking of how deeply he looked forward to rejoining with the man, despite the clarity with which he remembered the purpose of their scheduled meeting. Then once, twice more. If he didn't catch the thoughts in time, they would turn into questions he'd ask, if he could, to unveil but one more inch of the man's mind. Whether he would offer that they work together, again. How he would come to have those eyes, profound, gentle, on him again.

Erwin hadn't inquired. It was with just a hint of frustration that the doctor had swallowed down the stories threatening to spill past his lips, and pushed them as far back as he could into the safety of his own head. He would have enjoyed allowing the faintest hint of anger to slip out, for so long silenced; to watch the man's face when he so much as evoked the threats, the blackmail, the spies.

There weren't many men he'd met who would sacrifice both personal means and time and still promise not to cage the unfortunate aboard as one would livestock when the first glimpse of land came into sight. He appreciated considering telling the tales at all.

Levi had made them part in the early morning, though not before he'd seen the sun finally cut through the night, not before he'd watched its shimmer on the water, and the sparks it ignited in a few strands of golden hair, warm red first, then bright white.

“If you don't need help, fine. However,” he'd thrown when Erwin had stood, like an afterthought, looking at the white wraps. Had paused and willed to say his intent with only the force of his two eyes, “the moment it makes you susceptible of catching anything, I'm on your back.”

He could sympathize with the reserve, yet could not trust the rest of the passengers to refrain from catching illnesses, and spreading them. The doctor would surely know to tell if it aggravated, if this wound or another found a way to weaken the body in any way. Levi had walked out before he risked another glance to a ringless finger, the words his only goodbye, though not unkind.

Erwin was at his door when evening came. Levi had considered since their first encounter that it would take no less than a considerable effort on his part to ever scare him away. He only took the time to untie the cravat around his neck before he nodded, silent, and followed the man's steps.

The sea was roaring. The winds blew hard.

Martha waited on deck surrounded by a handful of unknown men. After the child's death, she'd insisted Levi knew both their names. She looked smaller in the dim light, smaller than the last time they'd met, hunched on herself and under sorrow. To the doctor she confided having never known the day Ada had been born.

If Levi was routinely faced with the end of life, he was less familiar with funerals. He stood barely closer than Erwin, still on the side. The minister, a man weathered by age in every way but his humble smile, said a few words that didn't mean much to him. Instead he thought of the little body, twenty-one grams lighter but the weight of tears shed on her. He thought the soul the man spoke of would have since long departed, having been blessed by salted waters, having been bathed.

The coffin hit the waves without a noise.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi: seitsensarvi  
> Erwin: 35g

 

Erwin offered to walk the woman back to her cabin at the funeral's end, but a gentlemen passenger, a relative or simply a fast friend, insisted. Her steps echoed, uneven. Erwin had learned her name and the names of all the men who presided. When he was lucky, it was easy to forget them. A name is a history, a presence, and a future. It's undiminished by its owner's fate.

He'd seen the captain leave as he arrived with the doctor. Foolish, to show himself speaking even briefly to a woman without papers and invite suspicion for not hauling her away in that same moment. Some day, his heart will betray him.

One by one, the men left alone, and they two remained. The doctor looked to the waves when she'd gone, deaf to anyone but a vast, liquid tomb.

Erwin brought a steadying hand to his shoulder and bit down the impulse to say something useless like  _I wish we had more time_  or  _You did all you could_. They had work to do.

They saw far fewer serious ailments, but visiting those with their potential beginnings was worth the preventative effort several times over. 

As mild indigestion and small aches replaced their heavier fare, the mood lightened. Even the small children they treated were a rare pleasure, one drawing the doctor's portrait while he checked her sister, another giggling infectiously when he tapped her elbow and knee. 

Erwin made an unspoken point of taking them past the cabins of children they'd already seen. Sickly things with fevers and bruises from days before bounded about under their feet rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed and crowded the doctor with blunt questions and winding stories despite his stoniest faces. Though they, Erwin was sure, might once or twice have cracked. 

It was a few days of late shifts and early chats at an empty salon about nothing at all, and through it all, his gut roiled at the memory of Hange's request - reluctantly granted - and his mind fogged with indignation unabated despite all their reason. 

They were making their last stop to check a couple at the end of a hallway when Erwin wondered if maybe it could be different this time. Easier.

When he'd first felt that pull, it was in the midst, and in his mind, a result, of a years-long romance. A wedding date on the books. A nursery's walls, half-painted.

He had no such attachments now. Privately, he loathed him as a drunkard would his last bottle, as a gambler would his only coin. When the ship lands, he will compensate the doctor for his troubles and never see him again. Like before, he will entomb himself for however many years it will take for the ache to dim. Hange could chart his every breath. 

It could be different. 

It was careless, then, days later, to end early on their very last night and pass a raucous salon, to tease, to ask, without thought at all, if the man's feet were as deft as his hands.

 

* * *

 

The nights passed, and no one died.

In the respite, it was easier to take the time to learn a little patient's favourite tale, to be given a drawing or a pressed flower and not think of a testament and a grave. It was easier to notice another's care. The kindness Erwin had for them. The doctor couldn't tell if he imagined the way his own hands moved quicker, swifter under his watchful eye.

Levi would watch back. Sometimes, early into the night, until he was satisfied that the unnamed condition be controlled, that what little skin he saw didn't look paler than usual. Sometimes, when their shift had ended, for no reason at all.

He'd almost avoided noting that the man seemed less inclined to disappear once the day's tasks completed, almost — and he didn't feel pride — repressed the smallest regret, stinging at the thought of going back to his self-imposed solitude, now that every last case was reported and surveyed and taken care of and he had more than enough of just himself to check back on each of them. It was what he had wanted. It was all he had asked for.

Only, as if to silence the thoughts, Erwin inquired, so off-handedly that if Levi could have held back his smirk, he wouldn't have cared to do it.

“Dancing? Haven't done any of it in a while, but I did learn. Terrible times.”

But how easily he could imagine the man, wearing a suit of too many pieces and a smile that would just about reach his eyes. Looking past the door, he pictured him in the crowd; proper, polite, his hand on a lady's back. Towering above. Dignified.

Levi could dance well. He'd never particularly enjoyed it. Yet, nothing prevented him from ordering a drink, from staying on the side.

From giving in to curiosity, most of all.

“But do go ahead, I'd hate to deprive you of the distraction.” The doctor took a step towards the salon and, lifting just an eyebrow, said the words before he could think them fully. “Maybe you can even distract me.”

 

* * *

 

Erwin smiled recklessly at how the doctor humored him. But a less cursory look through the open doors showed men far better groomed and spirited than a doctor and an assistant just off a graveyard shift. The always-lively band already cloyed at a faint headache. 

The doctor, too, hid his reluctance well, but not well enough. The hall was brimming and wild, and though it proved Erwin's work fruitful - the captain's preventative measures for the could-be storm were nearly complete with passengers out of the crewmens' way -  it was the last place he expected the doctor to feel sincerely comfortable. 

He squeezed inside for a bottle and a pair of glasses and left just as quickly to lead the man to the top deck with little more than a cant of his head, to a quiet little area hidden in plain sight within a lattice of ship equipment and shrouded by the moonless not-yet-dawn. The sea gurgled below as if to greet them. The doctor placed his hands against the rail with practiced ease as Erwin opened the bottle.  He watched the waters roil, and Erwin tasted his heartbeat.

He could drain him in minutes here and throw him overboard. Grief consumed him after the funeral, he'd say. I couldn't stop him, he'd say. His limbs trembled with the effort to stay put.

The salon's many gilded trumpets and saxophones were only a distant rumble beneath his feet.  Far beyond that, a lone whale with a heart like a throbbing boulder wandered past. He'd never heard a heartbeat from such a heart through such a black sea. 

He wanted to tell Levi about the whale. He wanted him to know how long he needed to wait to hear each single laborious beat of its massive heart. Bombarded by so many others below deck, he'd thought it only a terribly repetitive roll of thunder. Only in the open air and with a guiding hand at the doctor's back did he understand what the man had just made possible to hear. What Erwin wished he could hear.

Erwin passed him his glass. He imagined lifeless pallor in the hand that brushed his own. He'd drained his flask when they had rounded a bend at a staircase. He'd taken more than he needed, much more. Yet still, this near-but-too-nearness wasn't enough. Still, Erwin wanted him.

His blood. He wanted his blood. He berated himself for the errant thought, but he could think nothing more of it with the doctor watching him like that. The man who bristled when Erwin was half a moment delayed in bringing him some instrument or a simple pen said nothing of Erwin's silence now. 

"I hope you don't mind the brief detour," Erwin finally said. "I could never breathe the cabin air for so many hours at a time." 

Erwin took a seat on a secured crate and leaned back easily against another, smiled as easily at the doctor. "Now, seeing as I'm in the presence of a world-class dancer," he teased, "I'd bring shame to this ship if I didn't have just the lady partner or two in mind for you." Then, in a conspiratorial tone and a glance at his own shoes, "Far better distraction than these two left feet."

 

* * *

 

“Shame I can't believe a word.”

Levi toyed with the glass in his hand, suspended above the seas. Glancing at Erwin's features in the dark, he imagined the soft look on his face to match his playful tone when sometimes his face hid in shadows and he could not see.

“Someone with such an extensive knowledge of the proper use of silverware and this taste in wine can only know how dance.” He took a sip pointedly, the drink once again perfectly to his liking. “Mister three-pieces-suits-and-polished-shoes, whispering to the captain's ear, how many waltz did it even take to get there? Is it a hundred? A thousand?”

It was too simple to indulge, too natural to tease back. Levi had searched for reason, for the voice at the back of his head and had not found the smallest whisper, the quietest protest. No one else needed his immediate attention. No one else was about to die. There was nowhere for the doctor to be but here.

He was thankful for the calm of the deck, be it cluttered in crates and ropes; for the soft breath of wind. He would renounce them both, still, if it would allow him to see Erwin exactly how he insisted too strongly he did not want to be seen.

Curiosity ran through Levi's veins, tickling.

Had the man been sensible enough to consider only those of the ladies who were shorter than him, or had he paid his height no mind? He wondered whose draped skirt and powdered cheek he'd pictured in his arms.

Levi imagined no lady.

He stepped away from the railway and slowly, leisurely walked until he stood before Erwin, until he had to tilt his head down slightly to look at him and he was too close, too near. It was all play, only play. It was easy.

“I'll dance if you do.” He smiled a wolf's smile, held out a hand. “If you need as much help as you say, you better show me.”

 

* * *

 

"How impatient. I promise the ladies are just below," Erwin teased. But it was no bluff. The doctor's shadow consumed Erwin and denied him the moon. His voice carried the careless smile Erwin's eyes couldn't see. His hand alone emerged from the pitch, and only just. 

Erwin accepted the offered hand and rose.

"A generalization, maybe," Erwin corrected as his other hand skirted across Levi's lapels before resting on his shoulder. His wound burned. The doctor's other hand, nearly at Erwin's chest in anticipation, curled uncertainly and met his waist instead. Erwin understood the assumption. He should be thankful that the doctor humored him.

Erwin earns an undeserved reputation whenever he simply must entertain a financier or a society lady. Relying on quick feet and dips and tricks not only distracts his partner but tires them. They're never the wiser.

He explained as much to the doctor. 

"You can feel it," he said as, for a moment, they switched places and he lead with none of his usual whirlwind, no sleight of feet. Leaden steps. Stiff turns. Movements calculated with angles and seconds and percentages.

Erwin slowed, his eyes fixed inoffensively on the doctor's collar. "A taste in wine and tailored clothing can be learned," he said. "A few tricks, too, to fool discerning partners." 

He couldn't hear the whale anymore. He couldn't hear the sea. When he spoke, he hardly heard himself. The hand Erwin lay once more on the man's shoulder ached at how he resisted pulling him closer, resisted lowering it to rest over his beating heart. In both, he was less than successful.

"But I don't want to fool you."

Erwin had since thought better of the unspoken request he posed when he placed his hand not at the doctor's waist but his shoulder. He loosened his hands and waited for the doctor to come to his senses and pull away.

 

* * *

 

Levi held on tighter.

“Don't you?”

He removed his hand from the man's side, only for a moment. The next, before either of them could step back or make excuses or think, he was holding Erwin's gloved hand — the bandaged one, mindful of the wound underneath and it was more of a brush than a proper grasp but still he did not hesitate when he guided it back to his shoulder.

“Come on, then. Properly.”

Assured, as if it was only stubbornness, as if he did this every day. As if it was nothing.

“Novelty's sake,” he said, raising an eyebrow and almost expecting Erwin to retort that he often danced, often followed. He didn't. “Then you can go back to fooling whoever you wish, and I can go back to pretending I care about any of the dancing partners I'm sure you can't wait to introduce to me.”

And Levi never did this, had never done this, either. But this once. Just this once. He wondered which part of it was still a game, was ever a dare. Erwin only had to utter a single word to end it.

Erwin stayed silent.

Levi had to remember to follow the familiar, rehearsed rhythm in his head instead of the erratic drumming of his own heart. He worried at his lip in concentration to avoid thinking too much about their joined hands. About the way the man towered over him, and matched his every step. About the way he wanted this. As if it was nothing.

If he had spared the thought, he would have noticed that his fingers tingled and curled and held on cloth too hard, like a drowning man holds to his last breath of air.

“Unless you're too damn polite to say just how much you hate this,” he offered as they turned.

The doctor searched Erwin's face. He tasted iron on the tip of his tongue.

 

* * *

   
How cruel," Erwin hummed in his ear. "And to think," he said as they swayed almost cheek to cheek, "I almost thought I'd miss your company."

He was unused to so unapologetic a hand on his waist. The persistent, solid weight of it unspooled him. His leaden steps lightened. His mind emptied. Erwin thought of nothing but how the doctor's breath warmed his sea-chilled neck, of how often a rolling swell disregarded Erwin's careful distance and touched his lips just-so to Levi's temple, until it made more sense to press them without reservation to his temple and into his hair. Not a moment afterward, he couldn't remember what reservations he could have possibly had. Levi's heartbeat rushed, bird-like, beneath his teeth.

Their proximity and difference in stature allowed Erwin to comfortably place his arm across his back and relax his hand across his nape. Levi couldn't hide a single shiver, however slight. Not when Erwin's nails grazed the grain of his hair, and not when the meddling waters pulled them flush. It occurred to him when the hand at his waist tightened, pulled them closer still, that Levi never intended to hide. Stray morning gales played with their hair. 

His lashes fluttered closed against Erwin's cheek. Erwin's eyes stung. He wanted to live only to feel that sensation one more time. 

The moon shed her veil to meet the rising sun.

The winds changed, and Erwin's hand tightened around Levi's neck independent of his will. Dread like hot tar pooled in his gut.

There was blood in the air.


	17. Chapter 17

He'd stayed too long. All of Erwin's reason pounded against the wrought-iron cage of his mutinous body. White spots danced in his eyes. His ears began to ring.

He was going to kill him. A sinking corpse will see the dawn in the place of a good man as payment for Erwin's mindless indulgence. He'd stayed too long. He mourned him. Levi was already dead.

Erwin watched through his own eyes as if another moved his limbs. As if he were only an observer from afar. The doctor noticed the change in him and pulled away to meet his eye.

He met the doctor's briefly, as if a solitary look could speak a eulogy. They fell, then, not on his throat but his lips. On his ruddy, bitten lip. 

Erwin's heart thundered. It was such a small thing. He'd passed many liters more of healthy blood before. It shouldn't be so different. His mind shouldn't be so severed from his animal body.

But there was another way. He hated it as soon as it came to him.

His other hand left the doctor's. Both rose to cradle his head.

He couldn't move away. Not now. But Levi could. 

Levi's hands snapped around Erwin's wrists in warning as his back met the secured crates behind them not roughly, but not kindly.

If he could scandalize him. If Erwin could use the last of his control to uncap the flask and take the edge off instead of giving chase. If he could trick the sharks in his blood. 

Erwin moved closer and licked the man's worried lip between his teeth.

 

* * *

 

Levi wanted to pull away. Levi needed to pull away. Levi needed not kiss back.

He didn't think he'd felt air in his lungs ever since the man's mouth had first found his hair and allowed a press there; first found his own and allowed too much. Erwin had lunged and touched, less than soft and perfect and in a blink reflexes came back. Escape came back.

“Really, Smith? On the first dance?” Levi asked, the set of his eyes harsh like he wasn't speaking against the man's lips, like he had not wished for this, unaware, with every last inch of himself and every breath he hadn't breathed.

He pushed against trapped wrists, his hold firm until it forced Erwin to take a step back and still it was a crime to lose the closeness, the strength of him, the warmth.

Yet, Levi had promised he'd lead.

“Wish that I could make you dance more, clearly you're picking up fast”, he begun, attempted to distract, “but I'll soon be on my morning round. You know, to check that everyone passed the night.”

He could not lead with their bodies so close that his mind failed to decide between swallowing every last of the man's sighs and reaching for his knife.

The doctor felt Erwin tense, pupils still blown wide. He'd used the last of his resolve to keep speaking and keep the distance between them; to demand that the cold lashing wind give them both their senses back instead of falling of his very own will into the man's arms. Into the fire in his eyes. He resisted carding his bare hands through soft hair to say just how much he hadn't minded.

  
He released his unforgiving grip on Erwin's wrists at last. His fingers might have brushed against the tender skin in apology, light.

 

* * *

 

Erwin's eyes slid closed at the touch of Levi's blood on his tongue. Far from the immediate rush of pleasure as in the blood of any other, his was laced with something that uncoiled every last muscle of his strung taut, and filled him so fully with contentedness that he'd forgotten why he'd drawn himself so tight at all. 

And when lips spoke against his and hands pressed against his and when the battering wind stole his sigh, he remembered why. 

But the doctor hadn't shoved him off. He hadn't thrown a rightful fit, hadn't yelled. He'd only said something or other about seeing to their patients from the night before. 

And it should have been his end, but the gunshot-quick lust for more ended as soon as it began, as soon as the doctor had spoken. Erwin would sooner drain a rotting corpse before touching him. He couldn't understand it. 

Erwin excused himself. This was a question whose answer will wait another day. He will not refuse a miracle.

His legs worked until the lock on his door clicked shut and then no more. He went down where he stood, back of his head against the door and palms flat against his face or the floor or a cabinet if only something, anything, would slow the spin of the world. He should have refused Hange. He should have listened to his own instincts. They didn't know what it took to live like this. They didn't know how many friendships, one smile too intimate, needed to be severed. How many homes, once too comfortable, need be abandoned.

His chest heaved with revulsion. He didn't deserve to know such a man. Such a patient man, clearly disgusted at Erwin's display yet willing to refuse him as gracefully as if Erwin had asked him the time.

Erwin breathed deeply as bile rose in his throat. He couldn't pretend it was the blood alone. He'd drained his flask before rising to the deck. Even the bond, such as he'd experienced it once before, could not explain why it had been a dance and not a game of cards, a kiss and not a drunken tussle. The engine of that desire was not bloodlust.

He'd never given thought to men who sought a partner in another man. He was in no position to seek any partner of his own, so it never mattered. Now, the doctor will surely think so of him, though Erwin was not even sure of it himself. He wasn't sure of anything. He couldn't understand this night with all its flashes of violent cravings between demure, subservient bliss. 

He'd traveled countless times aboard ships large and small. Never had one felt more like the closing maw of a waking beast. 

Erwin wrote a letter that morning, slipped it into his jacket, and met Hange in their room at the closest respectable hour. He relayed the night's events with a little selective editorializing - they needn't know every sordid detail - and informed them that no force in this life or the next would persuade him to speak to the doctor again. His tone must have been sufficient. Even Moblit, raring to argue, shut his mouth when Erwin described how close the doctor had come to meeting the bottom of the sea.

They separated briefly before resuming their old examination schedule in the afternoon. Hange and Moblit left the cabin to eat. Erwin slipped a letter under a door.

Getting around the ship was impossible without leaving at least one hand free to grasp the nearest wall when she inevitably bucked one way or the other. Maneuvering around the storm had added several days to their Atlantic crossing. After a round of chemical tests in Hange's cabin, Erwin returned to the upper decks to arrange festivities for the remainder of the journey, though the captain had assured him that their most vulnerable equipment had been reinforced and secured. He needed the distraction. He needed something to do. It almost worked.

In seven days, they would reach shore. 

Erwin minded the beating of the man's heart only to know when to move when it came too near. He wouldn't visit the open deck at night anymore. He would hardly venture out of Hange's cabin. They and Moblit examined him in shifts. They were not to speak to the doctor for any reason.

In six days, they would reach shore.

 

*

 

_Doctor Ackerman,_

_I deeply apologize for my behavior. I will not waste a moment of your time with empty excuses. The captain will arrange your payment. You will not see me again._

_Erwin Smith_

 

* * *

 

Levi felt the wind lash at his face, harsher, colder than it had been before. They were reaching further north, he thought as if it held any importance at all. At any other time, it would have. It should have.

He stood on the deck, still, the way the man had sobered up in a handful of seconds replaying in his mind. The way he had fled again. Levi wished he'd given chase then. He cursed the ghost of lips on his own for the softness it had brought to his limbs. Yet, better this than giving in to instincts, or forget himself. Better this than slicing a throat.

The doctor knew not in which cabin the man retired when they had separated every morning. The man proved he had not forgotten where the doctor's was when he slipped a letter under his door.

Levi wanted no apology. Wanted not the way Erwin took the one weakness and made it his only, as if Levi had never wanted in some deep place of him; wanted not the way he took all the blame and all the shame and once hidden asked forgiveness for his actions alone, suffered his own judgement, alone.

The doctor would not be denied the truthfulness of a voice or a pair of eyes. Erwin could be apologetic then, could be disgusted. Levi would have him say the words to his face, or else not at all. Floorboards creaked under his restless feet.

It should have been easy to find any member of the crew that would tell him where the man stayed or where he could be found, anyone with whom he'd spoken who might have met with him somewhere, who might have known. But the friendly surgeon or the amiable quartermaster delivered only silence. Levi had expected the silver tongues, the apologetic smiles. He could ask them anything, the man had said and they had said alike; anything so long as it didn't matter. What they knew of Erwin's character, the jokes he told or the way he liked his wine. Never where he went, never what he sought, never what kept him there at all. Levi had half a mind to think they didn't know.

He paid little attention to the thoughts that kept reminding him how some short days before, he would have been glad to never see Erwin again. The job would have been done and he wouldn't have minded. Perhaps, if it had been any other man. He invoked stubbornness instead. The floorboards kept creaking.

Levi slept little. A man came to him on his round, skin sickly grey; quarantined against his will. Then, an older woman who coughed more than she breathed and she found an empty bed with the ill herself. The doctor briefly wondered if he should report anything, if he should write a note. He wouldn't.

He saw the rest of the patients from the previous days. He saw a girl with a red scarf and he did not have the heart to refuse her a reading when she asked.

She led him by the hand to sit in her favourite stuffed couch, yet all of Levi's attention was stolen when he recognized a young man seated not far by in the library. This once, his hands were steady. The doctor blessed his luck. He would take any piece of information he might consent to give, any clue he might let slip. Levi went and eyed the open book on the table between them. He hadn't meant to pry to engage. He pried anyway.

“Tricky things, blood illnesses.”

The man didn't lift his eyes.

“Indeed they are, sir, and none of those say a single thing abou-”

The man looked up and stopped speaking. He watched Levi with wide eyes as if he had remembered something, remembered him. He attempted to sit up; Levi raised a hand and lowered his voice.

“If it's got anything to do with someone on this ship, I'll get to them. Or you can find Smit-”

He had meant to speak Erwin's name.

The man was on his feet before he'd finished, shaking his head.

“No, not at all, sir, of course. It's merely research. But thank you all the same.”

He didn't leave Levi any time to press and instead he disappeared, quick as if his every step would hurt the carpeted floor, book still in his hand. He shouldn't have. Levi apologized to a pouting little girl before he left to follow.

Several near-empty hallways further down, the man paused to unlock a cabin door, a sharp twist of his wrist to match his sharp walk and sharper turns. Levi would not get to him there, not just yet even though questions burnt his tongue; instead he noted the number engraved in the golden plate, and went on.

He recognized a voice when he walked past the door.

Later, when night had come and he'd heard more than he'd seen that the young man and his other colleague had crossed a distant hall, but still not a glimpse of Erwin, still never him, Levi came back to the same door. The whole endeavor was little more than a guess. It felt familiar. 

One of the doctor's hands hovered over the lacquered wood. The other toyed with the edge of a beloved knife in his jacket pocket. It had just been polished.


	18. Chapter 18

Hange peeked into the hallway as the man who'd prowled it for two days and nights picked the lock on their cabin door. Moblit fidgeted beside them, red-faced and winded from their sudden about-face. Finally, unable to see for himself  and sweating through his shirt, he whispered,

"Shouldn't we-"

Hange wagged a finger no and drew back as the man peered around him. Hange peered out again at the click of the door. He'd gone in.

"Smith was holding back," Moblit said. Hange nodded, still in thought. This wasn't the behavior of a person who had been, in Erwin's words, mortally accosted. It was inevitable that his hunt would take him here. Hange had expected at least his presence, if not these lengths. But the doctor troubled Hange far less than his mark. 

Despite all their arrangements and affirmations and agreements, Erwin still abridged his interactions and left out whatever details he didn't dare part with for the sake of some unnamed fear, details that could make all the difference in their own hunt for answers. Hange couldn't even get out of him what had happened to the first person he'd become drawn to in this way, let alone what had occurred between him and the doctor several nights ago. 

Hange had never sought to publish their work without Erwin's consent. No one but they and Moblit would ever know. Erwin knew that. Erwin needed to trust them. Saying so was not enough.

He'd even left his bloodthirst in the air for Hange to catch. In the time Hange had wasted deducing that alone, they could have progressed so much farther. Decades of hiding and suppression don't shed easily, they knew. Every day, Hange fought the specter of catching him or Moblit sneering at their less-than-feminine companion or chiding their methods, though they'd never once given Hange reason to expect it. But time hurtled past them.

Erwin's connection had also rendered all their earlier and present readings and experiments meaningless. His every sensation and physiological tolerance was altered, many of them heightened. Two days since his iron mask descended, they veered still more wildly in every direction. Erwin wasn't immune to the air of futility in the cabin. Though he gave them his every spare moment and more, he gave his body alone. He no longer recounted the sort of incidents or anecdotes that proved many times more useful to Hange's progress than hard data alone. 

Waiting for the ship to dock and for this doctor to leave their lives was out of the question. Erwin had described the bitten leaves and ruddy cheeks of an early autumn in a pastoral town that hasn't existed in a century. He'd whistled the favorite songs of passing soldiers whom he'd invited into his home for a night prior to the invention of the steam engine. Erwin doesn't forget. 

Moblit begrudgingly agreed, then, that a little push wouldn't hurt.

It wouldn't take long. Erwin had briefly gone to meet the captain across the ship, but the range at which he picked up heartbeats had greatly improved since his connection. He'd know. 

Moblit stood guard. Hange bounded across the hallway in three large steps, threw the door open, slipped inside, and pushed it closed with their back.

They waved at the doctor as he recovered from their entrance. Moonlight gleamed from glasses to knife's edge.

"Homely, isn't it?" Hange said of the cabin. 

He opened his mouth to speak, but Hange went on, the barrel of Moblit's gun peeking out of their jacket:

"Sit wherever. Whiskey's behind you. Oh," they stripped the too-hot skirts from around their slacks and made themself comfortable at the foot of the door and waved the barrel, "this isn't for you." They looked beyond him to the port window, where the gun was aimed. "But it is awful loud."

They spoke again when their meaning met his eyes.

"We're waiting for a friend, won't take long." They sat up suddenly. "Hey, you're a doctor. You can break my stalemate with my assistant! Better to rip off a bandage slow or in one go?"

 

* * *

 

Levi's grip had tightened on the blade's handle at the thunderous entrance. He released it minutely after several long seconds. Then he watched a skirt add to the unnameable mess in a corner of the small room's floor with a single raised eyebrow.  


“Are you-,” he begun.

“No.”

“-in a hurry?”

“Ah, this. Yes. Kind of.”

His host turned to the door again, then to him. Then back to the door. Shook their head. Finally, they pushed an assortment of boxes off the desk unceremoniously, estimating that they were halfway between both, and sat down.

“See, our mutual friend will be there in a minute, except he never took the time to introduce us — which is a shame, because Mob over there and I think we'd have a lot to talk about,” they explained, all too fast, “So, just to settle things. Slow or in one go?”

Levi didn't know where to start. The rightful cabin's resident wasn't unfriendly to his trespassing; it had taken too long until he'd realized it had been by design. He could get answers. He could get too many of them.

He considered the loaded gun. If not for him, then for Erwin. The instruments and the test tubes precariously balanced, sometimes upon one another; the open notebooks and flying sheets of paper he'd barely had the time to look at before he'd been interrupted, and the familiar initials on them. The diagrams and times and mentions of thirst. Hunger, described in curt observations, factual and impersonal like any searcher's, but words that evoked a butcher's work more than a physician's. All of it, for Erwin. He humored them.

“In one go, for most cases.”

“I knew it!”

“It's no science,” Levi added as if it had any medical importance. “Only personal taste.”

“Now that we're in agreement,” the scientist said with a triumphant look and Levi felt they had not been talking about the theoretical bandage at all, “I must say it's nice that you could come. Wasn't easy to get the right timeframe.”

They said it as if they had invited the doctor over for tea; he refrained from commenting on the state of the room.

Levi's eyes wandered between the busy script of the pages laid out on the table, and the barrel of the gun. He was beginning to make sense of the rest of the words he attempted to read, this once not unwelcome; blood samples and too many notes in the margins, tight. It was falling into place. The rare illness, perhaps the wound.

It still failed to explain their current situation. The other was looking at him, expectant as if they were waiting for a sign or for him to ask. Levi allowed himself to voice a single recurring thought.

“Routine question on my end, any chance you'd be setting this up to get Smith killed?”

He saw the wide eyes and open mouth but received no reply; knuckles fell on the other side of the door, sharply, thrice.

 

* * *

 

Hange threw open the door to claim the confrontation's opening shot.

"Evening," Erwin said mildly. Hange looked him over. Squinted. This wasn't right. There was no fear, no outrage. Not a single anxious crease of the brow. Never was it so unnerving to watch a man behave entirely like himself.

His eyes passed easily behind them to the doctor. "Evening, doctor. I don't mean to interrupt." His eyes returned to Hange. "I can return later-"

"Not at all!" Hange said in between furious recalculations, "Come in, come in." They closed the door and waited just a beat before turning around. Something was wrong. The thought wailed in their head. The doctor, too, regarded him with mute suspicion.

Erwin took a seat with insulting ease. 

Hange plowed ahead anyway. "You might be wondering why the doctor and I are, uh-"

"Not at all," Erwin echoed. He glanced at the open journals and loose notes on the table. "It's always best to get a second opinion."

"Right." He wouldn't budge. Nor was this play at normalcy sincere. Hange knew how he played with others for favors or sport. This was neither. This was sinister. 

"Look, Erwin-"

"Have you shown him the journal in your jacket?" He turned to the doctor. "Hange's deductions are remarkable."

Hange froze. It was the only record that described the bloodlust without ciphers or innuendo. And now this feather-footed doctor with light fingers and too-clever eyes glanced precisely where Erwin's words led him.

 

*

 

"Of course I understand." Hange turned to him. "I said so in my letters, didn't I?"

The Maria shone against the night sky. The sounds of the crew preparing her for the morning's departure drifted across the pier.

"I only want to be sure," Erwin said quietly, then admitted, "I wanted to see you when you agreed."

Hange didn't speak for three swells. They had seen the odd story or two from across the Atlantic. In one district, polio robbed a school of every fifth student. In another, every third. Should they confer with other researchers about a perfectly noncontagious illness and unwittingly stir rumors that it was just the opposite, the man's reputation would collapse within the hour. It was only fair that, in return, their sponsorship agreement would be severed.

When the last one broke against the spindly legs of the pier, they cleared their throat. "Do you want to make it official? Get it in writing or something-"

"No," Erwin said. "I believe you."

 

*

 

Hange drew themself to their full height and pressed one hand to their chest with full bodied affront. "Mister Smith, how  _uncouth_. My personal journal, my, my  _refuge_?" 

Erwin's eyes widened a touch at the unexpected turn. Hange had him. "Would you also like to know my innermost thoughts on the swelling of the third wart on my second toe-"

"Maybe not in such deta-"

"Please leave, sirs," they said with their arm flung over their eyes, and hoped their wobbling lip was convincingly pathetic. With Hange's eyes shuttered tight, they only knew by the creak of the floorboards and by Erwin's low, almost amused "I apologize. Excuse me," that they had won. Erwin wanted to salvage this after all, wanted the doctor to live after all. Hange would not be cowed by theatrics. 

Hange peeked between their fingers at the understandably bewildered doctor. This messy, singular variable. They won't have one like this again.

They gestured to Erwin's retreating figure. "Catch."

 _Fly_ , they could have said, and flung him into the sea.

 

* * *

 

Levi followed the artful duet of both voices, of veiled implications and hidden meaning he didn't get no matter how hard he stared. His eyes were on Erwin, then the scientist — Hange, he'd read the name — then Erwin again, never missing a beat and still he felt he was held by a forceful grip and kept three steps behind. He had to rely on too few scribbled notes to fill the gaps.

He'd fast abandoned his instincts screaming murder. When Hange spoke and ice dripped from beneath Erwin's soft words, it seemed they had offered the man a fate worse than death.

Like Levi was a fate worse than death.

He couldn't figure why Hange wanted it, and it didn't matter; when they told Levi to go, he went. The man had always been smoke he attempted to grasp. He barely remembered the solid weight and the warmth of him under his fingers. It might not have existed at all.

“Hey.”

Yet, if he could catch the flame.

“My room, then. You know the way.”

He'd crossed the threshold without a second thought, couldn't have seen the distressed face he'd passed by. He watched only one.

Erwin didn't run. Levi didn't strike. He watched the man resume his walk, straight ahead; willing if not for the weight he seemed to carry in the tilt of his head, the slight curve of his back. It could have fooled Levi, at any other time. Erwin made no move to turn to him, no move to look back. There was no reason to look back.

He would have remembered by now. There wasn't a place to go that wasn't confined by the closed frontiers of floating wood, of iron. There wasn't a place to hide. Levi followed, resolve etching lines on his brow.

The doctor's mind soon drifted, busy with analysis and odd numbers. If he could figure the reason in so short a walk, he'd allowed himself the guess, that the man's blood turned on him. If he could cross the distance between them, those few small strides lost to the void, shielded with steel. They passed rows of dark wells carved into the walls. Levi remained three steps behind.

He knew Erwin wanted, and wanted not. Secrecy. Help. A doctor's hand on his arm. Levi wouldn't dismiss the shame the man felt for his condition, nor the reserve he showed. He spent more time considering his arguments than he did wondering why he allowed the sting to run through the marrow of his every bone like a needle threading need.

It flared whiter when he got close to open his own cabin door — a courtesy, and their eyes did not meet. He'd reviewed the comfortable escapes. Half-lies. The man's, or his. He'd thought of the old excuses, a difficult patient here, the fear for an outbreak there, and all died on his tongue when they had both stepped in, and silence remained, and time stood still.

Instead he tried to catch a gaze that had still not sought his.

“Can't see me ever again, right.”

 

* * *

   
  
The door shut with a too-soft click. The setting sun burned them. 

The doctor rounded him, slowly. Too many had learned the finer details of Erwin's condition, especially before he'd smothered the impulse to make easy friends. He'd seen his share of reactions. This wasn't it. 

Levi didn't know. He'd weighed the possibility as he walked, but now Erwin was sure. The doctor could still walk out of this room.  

He smiled humorlessly. "I've never given someone so many ways to extort me in so short a time."

It felt strange to speak above a whisper. Maybe if fate was hard of hearing, she would pass them by. 

"One, I deserve," he said to the memory of wind-bitten lips. "You've led me here, I assume, to hear your demands."

"But the other, I appeal. Doctor," Erwin said, turning to him, "forget whatever you've learned in that room. It seems the price I pay for my physician's skill is their tenuous understanding of confidentiality. But you understand. You wouldn't have agreed to help the captain and I otherwise."

Erwin looked away. "Though I'm hardly one to lecture about boundaries."

 

* * *

 

Levi's throat tightened. He could not read Erwin's face. It wasn't the first time; each was more unsettling than the last. He refrained from asking what the man thought had made his physician turn to him behind Erwin's own back.

“Doctors talk more than you think, Smith. Patients, not enough.”

There was a fire in his veins, set alight with the urgency to know and he would not admit it; not to Erwin, not to himself. Not even to the sea. It burnt regardless.

“Blood's unknown. Transfusions don't work. I know easier ways to kill a man... So tell me, what is it that makes one seek a doctor then keep him away?” he asked, and his eyes remained on Erwin, surveying, preying. They will not leave that face. They will not allow for another escape.

“What is it you know and need and can't ask for,” he went on, lower. “Someone's blood? Anyone's?”

The descending sun caught in Erwin's hair. Levi's hand closed around his knife. His fingers toyed again with the familiar cold, the comforting threat. Then, he pulled it out. The man's jaw worked. Levi pressed harder.

“Probably not Hange's. Would've told.”

His thumb ran against the sharp edge, softer than a caress and it had not taken a breath before he could watch the blade shine silver, the skin pearl red. He angled his wrist to let Erwin see.

“Mine?”


	19. Chapter 19

Erwin followed the lazy drop. It was too late to hide his eyes from the man. He knew his pupils were pins.

"I never took you for a vindictive man."

His voice was foreign to him. He may as well have spoken for the first time in a year for how it cracked in his pinched throat. His heart beat as if to rupture. All the world swam like oil but that single drop. 

"Or a fool."

He paced about the doctor and drew nearer to try to budge him from the cabin's only door. He felt for his flask, drained the last of it now that all propriety had fled. He fought revulsion at the stale rat's blood. One blood bag hadn't been enough since he'd tasted him. Erwin couldn't make himself steal another.

Cold sweat beaded his heated skin. Rivulets ran from brow to jaw. He couldn't last. Not in this room with its closing walls. Not with him. Years of planning, wasted.  

The doctor wouldn't move. Not an inch.

Erwin grabbed his collar.

"Let me go."

The doctor stood his obstinate ground. 

Erwin pinned him to the door and wrapped one halfhearted hand around his neck. The idle knife flew reliably to his own, and when it did, Erwin pressed forward and snapped his head to one side. The doctor froze in shock as blood poured down Erwin's front. 

The bleeding stopped as soon as it started. The shallow cut stitched itself shut before even the growth could manifest. Erwin hoped his curiosity was sated.

He'd written Hange for more than ten years. They were as invested in keeping this secret as Erwin. By extension, so too was Berner. Erwin didn't know this man. The news could infect the ship before sunrise. It could start on land. It could start in thirty years. 

Only by the strange shudder in the doctor's collar and neck did Erwin realize it was he who shook like a sapling. Birdsong echoed in his head. A jack bickered with wrens over a brook. Needles scored his abdomen. His heart bludgeoned his ribs. 

"Please."

If Erwin used genuine force to budge him, he wouldn't be able to stop. He rested his pounding head against the cool door beside the doctor's own. The hand of Levi's pricked thumb had gripped the hand on his neck and smeared Erwin's wrist. He could wade through floodwaters in an iron mine and not forget the smell. He breathed in fits and starts.

He'd consigned himself to the sea from the moment he pressed into the knife. When he reaches America's shores, he'll sleep until all these people and all their children are gone. The cure would wait. He would wait. Rivers ran with the blood he'd spilled. He couldn't do this anymore. He couldn't flood their banks anymore.

But this stupid man refused to move, and Erwin's teeth ached.

"Please," he slurred, so delirious with pain that he couldn't remember why he begs.

 

* * *

 

The doctor moved not an inch. Took not a step. Not when he smelled rotten blood from the man's flask and his throat clenched and for a second he saw corpses devoured by pest and remains left to decay.

Not when sweat beaded on Erwin's temples and his eyes lost their focus and his breathing spiked.  


Not when his back hit the door hard and the despair in Erwin's words hit harder.

Not even when a hand curled about his neck. He wondered if Erwin had the strength to close his fingers and press against his throat but the man silenced down to the last unasked question when he cut his own neck instead of hurting him.

He'd never intended on hurting him.

Levi watched with doctor's eyes skin tear and blood trickle down his blade, staining silver, staining white. He couldn't imagine a single wreck, a single ship torn apart at sea that was more violent than the river of red pouring out of the wound in Erwin's tender flesh as if a storm. The man would drown. Levi wanted to move now. He could not.

The bleeding stopped before he could loosen his hold on the knife. His fingers ached at the strain. He gripped tighter.

Erwin shouldn't have been able to heal so fast, or heal at all. He shouldn't be trembling above him now. Levi should have guessed wrong. Blood on his lips. Blood on his thumb. Delirium, or withdrawal. It matched the symptoms, the tremors and the sweat and the wild eyes. It matched all he'd read in Hange's notes. It did not match what he could reasonnably believe in his own mind.

All for a single drop.

Erwin stood heavy upon him. He hurt. He asked — begged. For everything at once. For nothing at all.

Levi felt the man's heartbeat drumming against his own chest, beating the loudest. He could have pushed him away without strain then, could have shoved him aside. Could have left and willed himself to forget everything the man had ever said to him, shown to him.

He let his head fall back against hard wood and closed his eyes. A shudder ran up his spine.

“Take it.”

He knew not why he said the words. When at last he moved his hand still grasping the knife, it wasn't to drop it or free himself from the man's dizzy embrace, but to bring it between them over his own arm. Levi wanted it. It boiled in his gut. He could not recall ever wanting anything so terrible in his life.

The doctor would have scoffed. The doctor would have reproved giving anything of himself, having never considered giving so much no matter how many times he'd seen death in a patient's eyes. But it wasn't the doctor who spoke. Even now, Erwin wasn't his patient. For all his misery, there wasn't the slightest glimpse of death in the man's eyes.

“Erwin,” Levi said, louder. His voice was harsher than he'd intented, sharp like shards of glass. “Take what you need.”

He hoped it wouldn't break. 

“Take it now.”

 

* * *

 

 

"Take it," she said. 

Erwin turned, grinning wide as he perched at the base of an oak and pulled her to him. She polished the peach on her frock and reached out.

He turned his head this was and that to tease until her other hand rose soft to his jaw and he laughed, he bit.

He chased the juices down her hand and wrist. He nipped playfully at her fingers and closed his eyes to birdsong.

"Take it," he said.

The wood at his back was dead. The hand at his jaw, unfamiliar. Drops met his lips, his tongue, and the ground shuddered and swayed. His mouth inched open of its own accord as he returned, piecemeal, to a colder century. 

Hot, sweet, blood pooled in his mouth. It poured down his throat.  

His fingers reached to see what his eyes refused. Tears spiked the lattice of his lashes as he felt an arm held aloft, as heat scored his throat and pooled in his gut. His breathing slowed almost to nothing, but every breath filled his lungs to their limit.

His hands coiled lazily around the offered arm as bliss loosened his limbs and dulled the knives in his chest. He drew his arm closer until his lips pressed into cooling scarlet. Desire tightened his grip. The knee on his thigh pressed closer. The hand at his jaw remained though it needn't hold him any longer. 

His lips chased broken skin with unbroken kisses, chased a coiling river deeper still until it rose under his wrist. He didn't trust words to his voice, didn't know if he could speak again but to moan, didn't know how else to thank him, to do something, anything, about a different kind of ache in his chest. No one had ever given. He'd known only to steal.

His teeth grazed his wrist, and Levi's hand trembled, snapped into a fist. Erwin flinched in response, though he wanted it dearly, wanted it more than he'd ever thought it possible to want. But he was tired of hiding, of stealing. He closed one hand over Levi's and looked at him.

Night had long since veiled them from the sun. He saw not his face but his heightened pulse. Levi was afraid.

He'd given enough. It would have to be enough. The back of Erwin's head met the door as he began to let go. These drops would sate him for days.

Levi pressed forward. He repeated himself, as if Erwin's hesitation annoyed him, and his hand uncurled. A sliver of moonlight inched into the cabin. Levi watched his lips, his own slightly parted. A light flush colored his face. 

Erwin threaded their fingers and turned away from him to open his jaw and unfold the fangs behind his canines.

Levi turned his head back, wanting to see. Erwin resisted, fearing his disgust, but the hand on his jaw was unyielding. Levi drew nearer, slowly tipped Erwin's chin until the internal canines emerged entirely and slotted between his other teeth, and studied every inch of them with enraptured eyes. 

When his hand left his jaw to trace the delicate teeth, it was Erwin who pressed his head into the door with great force, he who swallowed thick and shut his eyes and feared for his life. He hadn't opened them in years. They fell and regrew when used with enough force. It wouldn't take much at all to yank them out of his skull and kill him outright. By his fine touch, Levi must know it, too.

His hand fell away. It then returned, this time to his chest, and Erwin exhaled unevenly with relief. He kissed the offered hand, fiercely kissed his wrist and lingered only a moment before he unfolded his teeth and pierced skin.

Blood rushed with every surge of Levi's heart. In greedy rapture, he sucked, stopping only when Levi - too proud to show it on his face - gripped his chest and panted. 

The river flowed faster than he could swallow. Rivulets ran down his chin, his neck. Levi's heart beat too quickly. His head began to loll. His hand fisted Erwin's shirt, his threaded hand. He'd taken too much, too quickly.

Erwin withdrew and laved hard at the twin points with his tongue, recalling through the haze of fullness and heat and lust that his physician had proven what he'd long suspected of its quickness to clot. Levi's head fell heavy to his shoulder.

The heat was unbearable. He opened his bloodied shirt to catch any merciful breeze on his skin. When he was sure the points had closed, he moved to catch any drops that threatened to stain Levi's folded sleeves or fall from the tips of his fingers. He could feel Levi watching him suck them clean.

Levi lifted his head. Erwin wanted to kiss his temple, his nose, his lips. 

"Levi," he breathed. He couldn't say anything else.

He wanted to touch him, to please him to the end of sanity, to end the wretched distance between them that felt more unnatural now than any engine, any steel-skinned machine. 

"Levi."

He didn't yet possess enough shame in his state to hide his want from his roving eyes. When he couldn't bear it any longer, he shut them. He didn't want to steal again.   


* * *

 

Levi's hand curled around Erwin's jaw when his lips closed over his offered arm. When he licked at the cut, sucked at the skin. He slurred Levi's name and Levi would have given every drop in his veins to hear him say it again, for Erwin to never stop saying it. Here and then he spoke someone else's, softly.

Levi only knew to expect the sting of the knife or the slow drain of a bleeding. He could not have expected the fangs. He only hesitated a moment. Only feared a moment. When the man's knees gave way, Levi went down with him.

The next, he chased Erwin's eyes when already he attempted to hide, beautiful and dangerous and shy. He asked again with his stubborn hold, louder. When the man turned his head back to him and Levi graze deadly needle-teeth with the careful tip of his fingers, it felt like victory.

He could sense Erwin long for it, nearly trembling for how much he yearned. Levi knew not how much he needed, how much he could take once he'd let himself take. He felt the delicate, sharp fangs pierce his skin as gently as they could as if Erwin would have rather died that very instant than cause him more pain than he needed to, and he forgot to ask.

This time, he found he needed not grip again. His thumb hovered over Erwin's cheek. He found he needed only lift his fingers just so to stroke his neck and send shivers to ripple on his skin, so he did. Erwin's throat worked under his hand with each swallow. Need pooled in Levi's spine. It set his nerves alight as if he were the one drinking.

The dizziness came mere seconds after. He should have known to tell.

Erwin's body boiled under his brow, his cheek. He couldn't recall the man opening the buttons of his shirt, or releasing his arm. The doctor remembered to breathe to gather whichever sense would come back first. He breathed in the heat radiating from Erwin's skin and each slow beat of his heart to calm the staccatto of his own. When he could tell again where his limbs ended, he forced himself away and he watched.

He saw Erwin's fallen hair and parted lips and peaceful face. He saw Erwin for the first time.

He looked alive for the first time, as if Levi's blood had brought him to finally wake after too long a sleep. He was no longer guarded. He was real. He had never looked more real than in this instant, never more beautiful. Levi watched as if he could be robbed of the sight.

He kept watching when Erwin's tongue came soft and warm over each of his bloodied fingers. He had not seen such reverence at a sultan's court. Not in any lovers beds, not in any prayer. Levi burned everywhere the careful touch had passed.

Erwin let his hand fall away at last, eyes coming shut. He waited like he had exceeded his time, and it was Levi's turn to decide. Remain a little longer. Leave, if he wished.

Levi craved him near. He wanted to taste his name on Erwin's lips. He wanted Erwin's lips stained with his own blood, calling him, as if it would make him feel just how he had felt drinking from him. He came closer to lick at his mouth, once. It wasn't quite a kiss. Erwin's breath caught nonetheless.

His hands came to rest over the man's chest, his touch gentle across muscles and bones, soft hairs and raised skin. He needed to. Some of the wounds had been deep. Some, deeper still. Levi had not seen them in the muted blue of the night, in the blur of his mind. Scars marred all of him.

It could have been his heightened pulse, his dazed spirits. His head still felt too light. His hands would not, could not leave Erwin.

He removed the shirt next. Erwin let him. He grabbed his arm with a strength he didn't know he still possessed to pull him back on his feet, slowly, and led him to sit on the bed instead. Erwin still let him, searching his face. Haze clouded his sky eyes.

Levi came to stand between his legs, and took his time like he had centuries. He traced red streams on Erwin's sides. White fields on his arms. He came closer still to feel the colorless dips and panes of his back and with his fingers catch the marks his eyes couldn't see.

He'd never touched anyone's scars but for diagnosis, never like this; didn't know it could twist at his heart and shake him so deep. He recalled words of near-deaths and battlefields. His hands felt too rough. He feared his touch would suffice to scrap the mended wounds open and bring the pain back, haunting and real, but Erwin let him again. Levi wondered if the man realized what he was giving.

“Those don't...” He couldn't yet trust his own voice. “They haven't fully healed.”

He brought his hands up to Erwin's nape. His fingers carded through silver hair, in comfort or gratefulness, and his head fell. He sheltered a sigh in the curve of his bared neck.

There he kissed the one scar he knew bore his name, again and again.

“Erwin.”

He barely whispered.

“How long?”


	20. Chapter 20

 

He understood little but that soft, burning lick, little but that he was being pulled, pushed, moved. His shirt was draped across one of Levi's arms, and he couldn't remember how it had come off. 

He'd not entirely met the bed before Levi was in his hair, on his skin. His flesh rose as Levi roved over all of him, calloused hands passing like silk over old, misshapen stories raised white and pink and red on his chest, his abdomen, his back. 

The answers he meant to give drowned in a sigh as lips branded his neck. His hands rose to Levi's waist, his thigh. It was difficult to think.

He hummed. "Long." 

Erwin couldn't decide how much to say. His head tipped against Levi's chest.

"I saw, once, the Sun King."

The glittering procession passed in the distance as he'd wandered unfamiliar streets. He'd only known who he'd seen long after.

He shut his eyes. "Before that, I played mercenary." Hands passed over the kiss of a Dutch axe, an Ottoman bullet. "It didn't matter to me why, or for whom." The Holy Roman Empire shattered on his back.

"I always moved." He had no other choice. "I shouldn't have survived what I had. I couldn't let anyone know. Least of all my friends." His empty graves scored continents. 

"Before that, I raised sheep." 

He hummed at the hands in his hair. "I herded them. Sheared them. My mother dyed the wool." He smiled against him. "I know a son's meant to outlive his mother, but..." It fell away. Erwin's hands fell away as he sobered. "I never knew by so much."  


* * *

 

The doctor counted the years. The number stole his breath.

Had he not seen the way the man hid his condition like one protected a life, he would have not believed a word. Had he not seen him drink for his own veins, flushed and aching, and he would have dismissed the whole encounter at this very moment as little more than a dream.

It seemed too long a time to get lost; to get found, longer yet. Levi wanted to learn each of the man's lives, from herds of sheep to god-men, until he would call them by name. He wanted to ask which had hurt most to discard, which ones he missed. How old each wound, how great each pain. How great the weight of centuries.

“Always thought there was a charm to older men,” he said to close a slowly settling distance he hadn't invited. The man's hands still left a ghost warmth on his sides, long after they'd fallen. Erwin smiled. He didn't come closer. Levi didn't pull away.

He wondered how many others Erwin had lost to time, how many others yet he'd lost to fear. Then, not for the first time, he wondered why him.

He lifted the man's head still nested in his palms that would too easily hide from him if given the chance, and he sought a far-off gaze again. With his thumbs he traced patterns across elegant bones, there unmarred skin.

“Is that who you were calling, your mother,” he asked, not knowing which end one usually begun at with near-eternity. He remembered the tone with which he'd begged the name, and Levi's own. His lips fell to Erwin's hair once more. He didn't attempt to resist it. “Marie?”

 

* * *

 

Erwin eyes shut at his caress, brow twisted at his not-too-veiled affirmation, at this too-easy affection. This rapture ebbed, but his words and his touches remained, affected Erwin still more now that he grew more lucid to hear him, feel him. An intoxication of another kind. 

He was glad for the wall of Levi's chest to absorb the shock of what he'd said. He stiffened and set his jaw and knew that he needed to lie. He needed to say nothing to this man who softened the planks of his shoulders with strong hands the moment they'd risen. Erwin's hands rose again to stroke his thighs between his own and he buried himself still farther into his heart because he was afraid, because he couldn't lie to him. 

"No."

Erwin's shoulders fell under strong hands. "If everyone in the world haunted me like this,"  _like you_ , "I wouldn't have outlived Descartes. She..."

He shouldn't hide from him. Erwin withdrew only enough to look at him. "I knew her in my first lifetime. Barely a man. I knew enough about the condition to hide it, but not to respect it." 

Hares had sated him just fine. Wolves, if he was lucky, even moreso. Then, one day, they didn't.

"I thought I could still have a normal life. I thought I could hide it forever."

When they began to live together, when he wanted more of her than he knew she would ever give, he could never have enough. He hunted for days at a time. He drank his own body weight. A stranded mariner swallowing seawater.

"I knew I wanted her blood more than I wanted to live, but I couldn't understand why. Why she was different. I left for years to play soldier, to send the money home and get away. But I loved her. I thought that would be enough."

Erwin withdrew entirely. He removed Levi's hands from his shoulders. "The night I returned, I drained her in her sleep." She slept blissfully through it. "I took too much." She'd begun to writhe and gasp. "I took her to the town doctor's and ran." He knew to stop only when the dialect grew so foreign he could barely understand it.

"I dug a grave in some thicket while I could still taste her and paid a man to fill it before beating him there and playing a corpse. I didn't want a quick, painless end. I remember the thirst. I remember dying." 

"But I'd been too impatient to find a casket. Eventually, there were boots and guns overhead. Men died and bled overhead." 

"When I rose, I may as well have been born again. I recognized nothing, no one. I'd been so delirious from thirst that whatever my life was before seemed like a dream. A nightmare."

Erwin had slept, last he counted, for ninety-three years.

"But it wasn't. I wasn't sure before this voyage, but I am now," he said. It was a particular kind of thirst. When it consumed him again, all of him, he knew. 

"I won't make the same mistake." 

The first items on the itinerary once he'd risen and made his initial fortune in mercenary work were iron caskets and deep graves. "I don't know why you've done this. Why you...you've offered."

But he knew. He surely did it to keep the devil at bay, to ensure his own survival. Every affectionate word, every touch, only served that end. Maybe, like a younger Erwin, he'd been too sure of himself, too sure that he'd never encounter something like him.

He couldn't understand only why he still trapped him between his body and his bed, why his palms still returned to his neck and his face after everything he'd said, everything he'd done. 

The cabin shuddered. Erwin smiled humorlessly. "But I hate to overstay a welcome."

 

* * *

 

Levi felt not the faintest tremor of fear at the man's tale. It should have make him afraid. It was supposed to make him afraid.

He only felt pain.

No past deed was worth renouncing Erwin's low voice when he spoke for him only, his trust when he bared his skin. Against his best reason, his heart. He spoke of dirt and blood and grief and Levi tasted iron on his own tongue. He spoke of regrets.

The doctor's hands had sliced throats by night and bandaged wounds come day. He wasn't as brave a man as Erwin might think. He would tell him, one day, but this much he already knew. He spoke of regrets.

He needed not know if Erwin wanted his blood more than he wanted to live, too. He needed not ask why he breathed easier just so when he felt Erwin's hands heavy and warm on his skin, why he sought air the very moment they fell away.

A chill passed in the gap between them. Levi chased it away. He traced circles on Erwin's neck again, on his back. He laced his fingers on his nape again. He said nothing for a little while. No man could be foolish enough to ever hope release another from centuries of guilt, of blame, and Erwin would have blamed himself for the shape of the moon and the passing of days.

“Do you?”, he asked, eventually. “Or d'you hate to think you could be welcome somewhere?”

Still Levi tried. Still he kept the man's confession in the hollow of his palms, in the refuge of his chest.

“Tried dizzy just now, didn't like it. Don't think I couldn't have twisted your arm fast enough. It's not happening again,” he threatened. He promised.

He could hold whatever Erwin gave him. He could keep it safe.

“Unless you'd prefer a doctor just to be sure. Perhaps you should find one.”

He came closer yet, until he could make out Erwin's eyelashes, their shadow in the dark. His thumb passed across his cheek. He dared not yet understand why he wanted to offer his arm, his arms, as many times as they would be needed. He wondered if Erwin would let him.

Levi kept his tainted hands light, dropped low enough to breathe against Erwin's tainted lips. He felt his skin, Erwin's skin, rise. He was starved for touch like he had not known touch before him.

He wasn't afraid, like he had never known fear.

The ship rocked him forward, harsher. Each time he found fewer reasons to refuse the pull. Erwin might even let him. The floor bent with them, and Levi closed his eyes. It wasn't any wave that made him sway. He could have forgotten the sea.

 

* * *

 

 _It's not happening again,_ he'd said, and Erwin nearly sighed in something - relief, he would insist. 

But Levi spoke again, and Erwin couldn't understand the playful, biting words, couldn't understand the return of dizzying, roving hands. Erwin leaned back into the hands at his nape, forward when they spilled over his shoulders, his chest, forward for still more when they mapped the column of his neck, the line of his jaw like a doll pulled by strings. He didn't know a greater cruelty. No gunshot or knife's edge pained him like the hands passing over their shadows as if they could promise something more than this moment on this collection of steam and steel in the middle of the sea.

So he stilled himself when ungentle waters stole the air between them, clenched his fists into the sheets of another man's bed.

Erwin drank sighs and feather-touch and recalled a promise made with blood on his lips. The floor behind them was stained red. He could pretend, for a night. 

Slowly, he pulled Levi's head down to lick at his mouth, once. He would make him understand what this meant to him.

Erwin traced the curve of his spine, the shape of his hips. He slipped the man's worried lip between his teeth and pulled him closer, parted his legs and drank his rising heartbeat as he fell into his lap. 

He was out of practice, but maybe Levi couldn't tell. Maybe he was too occupied by the deep flush on his face to offer a critique, too lost on Erwin's tongue and in the restless cant of his hips that followed the rocking of the sea.

Erwin couldn't recall when his back had hit the sheets, couldn't parse when fingers threaded through his own and held him down, when he'd been properly, happily, caught.  

He chased each teasing kiss and breathed in the blood rising to Levi's cheeks and nose and to his ears until his fangs, wise to his withering control, began to unfold. 

He turned away, but he was stopped. His captor drew both his hands into one of his own and used the other to tip his mouth open, coax them out again, and score himself against them both before folding them back with his bloodied tongue and licking into his mouth. 

Erwin saw stars. His hands broke from their hold and cradle-caged his face. Fingernails scored his shoulders, his chest. He drank until Levi moaned.

He'd offered himself again. Erwin couldn't think past blinding, full-bodied joy.

Levi moved away and gave in to the tremors in his arms to rest his forehead beside him. His throat moved with each deepening breath, neck shined with heat and sweat. His skin rose over the pulse beneath it. Erwin pressed his lips over the frantic beat as he rolled them with the sway of iron and steel and hovered overhead to press again and again and only barely resist marking elsewhere to watch society women blush at the not-quite-lipstick on a perfect wrinkled collar.

Hands roamed Erwin's back and left him stinging, wanting. Levi's hips rose, seeking relief against his thigh. Erwin raked his teeth against his neck and the sweep of his collarbone and hummed at the sounds escaping the cage of his throat as Erwin teased open one button, and a second. 

On the third, one hand caged his own as another pulled at his hair and forced his own neck bared.

 

* * *

 

Levi's lips parted against the offered skin, teeth gentle on Erwin's pulse, until they weren't. He bit down a little hard, and he felt Erwin shiver. His other hand curled about his neck as he soothed tender flesh with hungry licks. He felt Erwin tremble.

He watched hair spill between his fingers like liquid gold. Then, the rise of a chest, the arch of a back. He watched Erwin unfold.

Levi stoked the fire until he properly awoke an inferno, and Erwin burned for him. He chased the unbearable heat of his palms, his thighs like he could not get enough, might never get enough and all he could do was try. He kissed the wrist the man had offered, had let him catch, like it was a gift before he released it, and it took not a second before Erwin's hands came up again and Levi guided them where he wanted him, holding his waist, holding him.

He knew he rocked his hips forward once more at least, maybe twice, before he forgot to mind. He merely knew he would have been content to only drink Erwin's sighs, the way the man had his own blood until he could not stay silent either, or tell their voices apart.

He would have spent the rest of the night, of every night, chasing the very breath out of his lungs, the moans out of his throat. He would have lost himself so readily.

He remembered he couldn't.

"Wait," Levi whispered, but still he caged Erwin with his body and still he came once more to kiss and bruise and bite.

He couldn't. He had to keep track.

“Wait,” he repeated against his lips, but all his senses were distracted by the feeling of Erwin under him, over him, and it was a crime to catch his hands and bring them down and keep them still.

The walls shuddered again and Levi tasted iron on his tongue again and yet he needed to prove he could hold against the tide, against Erwin's pull, against himself. He had not known seas so cruel. He'd nearly forgotten to keep track.

“Later”, he said, unashamed for the shortness of his breath, until Erwin froze. “Soon,” he added.

He gathered the last of his strength with a throbbing heart when at last he willed his eyes to focus, his breathing to ease. His hands to fall.

“Gonna need to slow.”

A promise called him back.

“For tonight. Before... Still want another dance before that,” he said, and he hoped he sounded playful enough even as he sat back not knowing who he was trying to convince most.

He could contain him, he'd said. Himself. Have them stop.

He had lost a touch too much blood. He didn't tell Erwin that.

Levi rose only to come and lay close again, allowed the one weakness if Erwin would have him, just for a little while. The early morning glow reddened the man's lips. He kept his eyes closed and a slight frown on his face, and Levi wished he could read it, soothe it with one more careful touch.

He might have stroked his cheek on his way. He hoped Erwin wouldn't mind.

 

 

* * *

 

  
Erwin watched Levi's eyes slip into a different kind of fog. Freed of his own, he felt the too-burdened heart beneath his hand for the first time and squeezed his eyes shut to stem the tide of panic, the feeling of having been here before.

But Levi doesn't push him away, doesn't fear him.

Neither is he delicate. His hands slacken and he sways as he rises on his elbows, but his eyes follow Erwin too closely. His feet are planted, poised.  Levi doesn't trust him, and Erwin couldn't be more relieved. 

Erwin moved to rise, sure he wasn't wanted anymore, but Levi's arms snake around his waist. He pulled until Erwin lay beside him, until Erwin rested his head against the rapid rise of his chest. He moved aside a fold of his half-buttoned shirt and pressed lazy kisses to the soft arch of his sternum until the rise and fall slowed, until deep breaths passed pale lips. 

He slipped out of Levi's cabin when he was sure he wouldn't wake him. He couldn't allow himself to be near when he slept. 

Erwin passed in and out of shadows to avoid passersby. The blood that had spilled across his front bled through to his skin and was too fresh to pass off as anything else. The smell heightened, too, as blood does as it ages.

He stopped by the washroom to clean up and lost himself until his hands stung. The fall of blood and water into the basin echoed. 

When he returned to his cabin, he learned that not half an hour had passed. He dressed and stood where he was, outside of time and space, outside of himself. He'd never felt so infinitely full,  and so inexplicably hollow.

An unfamiliar weight pulled at his bones. He sat on the edge of his bed, thinking it a momentarily dizziness, but the pull only strengthened. His bed had never looked so inviting. 

He didn't know when he'd laid down. When he woke, his eye caught the pitch beyond his porthole. It was midnight. He'd slept through the day.

He hadn't slept like this in centuries.

His hand was on the doorknob when he registered a heartbeat just outside. He pulled the door open and looked around. Beside it, snoring against the wall, was Moblit. 

He startled awake when Erwin shut the door. Moblit ignored Erwin's offered hand, stumbled to his feet, and started walking  with a gesture that made it clear that Erwin was to follow. 

Hange was, predictably, ecstatic. Their gamble worked. They had even found and convinced the doctor to allow them to take readings and samples for posterity. Erwin didn't know what to think of these two universes meeting. 

He sat still for his own examination, mind elsewhere, anywhere, but here. It clawed at him now, all this equipment. All these shining instruments and reams of pages about him, all about him. Erwin thought back to the years it had taken to convince himself to do this, to understand himself. The ship pitched, and a glass cylinder rolled off Hange's desk and shattered. This was never going to be comfortable, he thought as Moblit busied himself with sweeping. This was never meant to please himself. He fought to return to that state of mind, to remember the rot of loneliness, and the relief and the satisfaction of direction, of purpose. Instead, he hit a wall: a certainty that his universe had been irrevocably changed. 

"Erwin?"

He returned to the present and looked up, then down. Hange had taken his injured hand and unwrapped it. With his other hand, he ran his fingers down the hardened growth. It chipped and cracked easily at his touch.

Hange grabbed a tin to place beneath his hand to collect the pieces, then, several sharp and prying instruments. "Can I?" they asked. Erwin nodded.

It crumbled away like an old scab. All of it. All that remained was a stretch of sensitive pink skin. The three stared in silence.

Erwin couldn't accept what his eyes were telling him. This wasn't right. He'd just had pints of blood. 

Moblit started uncomfortably, "Isn't this the opposite of-"

"Yeah," Hange finished. They gave Erwin a look before taking a small scalpel. "Could I make a tiny little-"

Erwin took it from them and made a shallow cut across his other hand. 

Again, they all stared, immobile but for the increasingly frenzied bucking of the ship. Blood beaded at the thin line, and that was all. Hange dotted it with a handkerchief and moved the lamp closer to watch, to wait. Nothing.

Erwin took the scalpel again.

"Erwin, wait-"

He cut a far deeper line next to the first. His arm strained to avoid slicing anything important. This wasn't right. It was supposed to appear instantly. It always appeared instantly. 

When he'd stemmed the blood, a few localized growths formed, but so small he could only squint to see them. Many hardened and fell away immediately.

"One-fifteen, morning. Two days to shore," Hange dictated, and Moblit wrote. "Abnormal growth is...nearly absent."

Erwin stemmed the flow again. "I'm bleeding out."

"No," Moblit said, brows raised in perpetual surprise. "That's just how folks bleed."

"Regeneration," Hange dictated, "Greatly slowed."

"Maybe he'd had too much at once right after a fast," Moblit offered as Hange reached for a vial of blood. Erwin didn't need to look at the label. It was Levi's.

"No," Hange said distantly, rolling the vial in their hand. "You know that's not why."

Erwin sank his head into his hands, his elbows on his knees. Abruptly. he stood. 

"This pitch is nauseating," he said, holding onto the nearest wall for stability. "I'll be midship."

He wrapped both hands and left before he could see the look on their faces. The walls shuddered. The girl with the red scarf bounded past at some point, he couldn't be sure. 

Erwin imagined it would take years. Decades. He imagined they'd never find an answer at all. Ship stewards patrolled the halls and insisted passengers return to their cabins. The open deck was barred for passengers. 

But they did find it. Within the week. By chance.

Erwin found himself in the emptied library, the room positioned as mid-ship as mid could be. He hadn't altogether lied about the nausea. His legs carried him to the farthest corner, though he entertained simply leaping from the ship to find the space to think.

He'd met hundreds, thousands of people, but it had to happen now. He had to have met Levi now, right when he, and Hange, needed him. It was uncanny. He couldn't understand it. 

He doesn't know the extent of the change in him. But he knows the growths have stopped. He'd slept. He'd bled. His stomach pained him, clamored for food. Real, honest food. He touched his face. He might even age. 

He may crumple all at once. All his stolen years would turn him into dust in a moment, any moment. Or he, a fixed watch, could simply resume from when he'd stopped. A missing gear, slotted into place. 

He was alive. He was terrified. 

 

 

* * *

  


”How much ?” Hange asked.

The room felt even more crowded now that Levi could take his time to look and Moblit was there. He hovered behind them like he had a million questions he didn't dare ask; Hange did instead.

“One liter tops. Didn't pass out.”

“Good, that means I can take at-”

“No more than a half. Make it quick.”

Hange pushed their glasses up their nose, looking pleased. “You seem eager, doctor.” A tube came near Levi's arm.

“Thought science couldn't wait.” The syringe looked infinitely less appealing than Erwin's lips. Levi refrained from voicing the thought.

He had thought he would sleep for days. Sleep hadn't come for long. Soon, he'd tasted the stillness in the air, the seconds suspended. A ray of light, a blink of eyes he thought he'd closed. He had awoken to a bloodied, otherwise empty bed, unsurprised.

Then, he had spent most of the morning cleaning up the crude reminders marring the floorboards, dry and obstinate, until his knees hurt and he could scrub no more from the sipping wood. He was feeling rested. He would remember to tell Erwin he preferred his blood anywhere but wasted to stain the floor. He was feeling better than he should have. Heavy drops had fallen on the carpet; he'd briefly considered getting rid of the thing altogether. He was feeling a tide pulling at his bones, one that didn't have a name.

That afternoon, Levi sat and told the scientists what he recalled, and he was glad for his own knowledge of the exercise when it meant that surely he could forego noting a pass of fingers or a brush of lips, harmless. He described the fangs and the draining of his veins with unaffected precision. If Hange saw the red blooms he hadn't entirely managed to conceal on the side of his neck, they yet made no remark. Levi didn't know if they had expected anything. He didn't think there were peer-reviewed procedures available for comparison.

The doctor flicked through notebooks as Hange observed the healing of his wrist. He read about regeneration or sleeping patterns, but he could not find the man he knew in the curt observations, the lonely numbers. Moblit filled more pages.

None of them knew what was in his blood. Levi didn't care to know. He'd accepted the proposal still, hadn't hesitated for long. He wouldn't refuse Erwin a hand, not after the previous night, but Erwin wouldn't ask.

"Seeing Smith after?" Levi wondered aloud, like the thought had just crossed his mind.

"Yeah. Both of you together only later, if you don't mind."

"Sounds like we got time."

"Dunno.” Hange raised an eyebrow, biting at their pen. “Any pressing matter to attend to the other side of the country when we arrive?"

Levi scoffed. None. Less. Somehow, whatever happened after their arrival had yet to become anything else than a mirage in his mind. He might have been content to contemplate the ocean a little longer.

That night, Levi wondered what Hange had found after he'd left. He hadn't expected to see Erwin that day. It made little sense to linger on how cold the sheets were now, how rough the inside roll of the waves.

He would have wanted to know if at least he hurt less.

Levi awoke short hours later; the waves had overflown his bones. They weren't in his bones. They were everywhere. For long seconds, he felt nothing but the incline of the floor, of himself. The ship went up, up still, before it suddenly hit the waters again.

The doctor dressed hastily; at times, upon another rise, holding onto the edge of the small table, the fixed bed. He left the cabin not knowing where he went but away. He cast glances over to the holes in the walls on the way; pitch-black night blinded his eyes. For all that he'd watched it, he didn't know the sea.

Quick steps took a familiar path through unused corridors and empty hallways. Then, stopped in front of a familiar room, still lit. Levi could tell Erwin was near. He hadn't meant to find him, but he could tell, the feeling numbing his sleep-clouded mind, unsettling.

The door opened quietly under the push of his hand, and Levi staved off at once surprise and not when his eyes met an equally familiar back, a crown of golden hair.

Briefly he wondered what custom would expect he say to greet a man who'd drunk his blood, who'd kissed his pulse. Whom he'd let.

Erwin had not turned. Levi addressed the hour instead.

“Sleep well?”

 


	21. Chapter 21

Erwin froze. It had been a while since someone could sneak up on him. He didn't think much of it when Levi's heartbeat became deafening sometime after he'd had his fill. It was new, though, for it to dim to nearly nothing despite being, as the doctor crossed the room behind him, at arm's length.  Another mystery for the list.

"Yes," he said. "A first."

He didn't want to see him. He couldn't think like this. He wasn't himself when Levi was near.  

Erwin glanced at his wrist, but otherwise wouldn't look at him, wouldn't look at much of anything. The ship groaned. 

"It's dangerous to roam in weather like this."

 

* * *

 

Levi met the avoiding gaze again, the void-lost eyes. He came closer.

“You'd wonder,” he said, “what's more dangerous between the weather and that sick look on your face.”

Perhaps the blood had not helped, not in the way they'd thought, but he had seen Erwin come to life under his fingers, sated and softened. Perhaps he regretted it. He would leave another letter on his doorstep, and it might even be late enough that the doorstep be not his anymore, neither the cabin, nor nothing on the ship.

Levi turned on his feet slightly so he could look at Erwin, not quite facing him. The dim light flickered over them.

“Happens often?” he asked, not knowing himself whether he spoke of the storm, or the drinking, or the ashen skin. He asked for all three.

 

* * *

 

"No," he said, though he wasn't sure what he was answering.

"And would you believe it's all this rocking?" He wasn't at all surprised that he looked as green as he felt. "I don't know how you humans stand it."

It slipped out, but he was past caring. There was no pretending Erwin was one of them. One wasn't lesser than the other, but to act, like Levi did, that Erwin was just another man when now he knew it wasn't so, to seek him out as if their business hadn't ended with their patients' last treatment, it unnerved him. He understood Hange's acceptance. They craved novelty and challenge. He understood, even appreciated, Moblit's antagonism. His fear. It was familiar. 

Levi wasn't afraid. 

 

* * *

 

He echoed. “Would you?”

The doctor knew sickness, knew to read people well. From Erwin, he only sought the shameless honesty once more, wished for his sincere words, unguarded again. He didn’t know why he chased it so. He could have nothing less.

Yet if Erwin needed, he would pretend for now.

“Turns out some folks can’t stand it either.”

Erwin might not have known how loudly his stance already spoke despite his best efforts, how the tension in his shoulders told of his wariness; his hazy eyes, this time, of pain. Levi wanted to wipe it off his face like he’d done his blood, with a pass of the hand.

“Got some remedies at hand that might help.” He could not tell exactly what he offered. If it even mattered. He took a step forward. “If you want.”

 

* * *

 

 

Even now, he stayed and offered, though all Erwin had done was take. Maybe he was a novelty to the doctor. A thing to approach carefully and examine. An oddity to coax into an exhibit, or a glass case. 

But he'd touched him, had sought his touch. It was an unorthodox way to handle a slight to nature. Erwin couldn't believe it wasn't sincere. Rash, stupid, maybe. Definitely. Not insincere. 

Still, Erwin was no competent judge. He hadn't allowed himself much more than handshakes and curt embraces for several hundred years.  

The doctor weathered another sharp pitch with a hand braced at Erwin's shoulder. When it passed, Erwin moved it pointedly to the table, fixed to the floor, instead. 

"You could have done anything to me in your cabin," Erwin ruminated over the muted howl of ocean winds. "Restrained me, exposed me. Killed me." He looked at him at last. "You led me to your bed."

The Maria groaned again, accompanied by distant snaps of tortured wood that raised the hairs at his nape.

"I can't imagine what horrors you've witnessed that you could offer someone like me such...civility."

 

* * *

 

Levi held his gaze.

“Figured you'd look better in a bed than cold on the floor.” He smiled. It didn't reach his eyes. "Wasn't wrong."

He watched Erwin before him at last, again; quiet, concerned. Hesitant. Humble.

“I could have done it well,” the doctor said, only to push. “I would've been quick. Tidy.” He dared Erwin to be afraid, out of habit. “Wouldn't have given you the time to lift a finger, but I would've watched your pretty eyes the whole time. For the trouble.”

Erwin wouldn't be.

And perhaps Levi had been moved by this man seeking him to help those poor souls, intent, instead of keeping them away. He had done so without a care for who they were, instead of throwing them overboard, and save himself the effort. 

Without knowing him, either.

Levi took a few steps, stiff, and this time his own eyes fell. He had given blood but not a word, had stripped Erwin bare but unveiled not a inch of his own life. He had not planned to.

“I've seen entire people murdered in cold blood, for no reason. For power. I've seen bad men. And I've seen myself on their leash. Obey.” A tremor passed through his spine. There was much, he reasoned, that hadn't been planned. “I left to never do it again.”

Levi remembered to breathe. He remembered the man before him, caught him with just his eyes, as he turned around. 

"I've seen monsters," he said, final. "You aren't one.”

Unrest stole Erwin's features and Levi watched, closely, closer, like it was a language he could learn. For just a moment, he forgot the raging seas.

 

* * *

 

"Then you should only hate me more," Erwin said. "Did you assume I was only ever a private? An honorable, earthly, conscripted soldier? I commanded men like you to kill other men like you." He turned in his seat to look at him fully. "These powerful men - I went to their parties and drank their wine. They gave me fortunes and lavish estates, anything to make me stay and give them just one more town. Towns I'd taken for their rivals just years before under a different name. I didn't need to. I wasn't destitute. I was bored."

He'd been aimless. Formless. The shepherd boy had been long since gone, and all that remained was a body that knew few limits, and a catatonic soul.

Cracks of thunder pealed through the windowless room.

"And when I couldn't keep ignoring their crimes, all I could think to do was shepherd them and their descendants away from the homes I'd stolen and burned. To ease their way with blood money. I would've done it forever."

A Charon for the living.

He passed a hand over his face and stood, unable to keep still. He rambled, thought and pieced it all aloud. "But I couldn't keep taking blood. I couldn't keep stealing. I wanted a cure, a substitute, anything. I expected a more conventional answer in a bottle or syringe." 

He grabbed a shelf to brace against as books and chairs tumbled. 

"I didn't expect you."

"Mister Smith!"

Erwin turned as a crewman popped his head in. "Captain needs you on the bridge if you're able," he panted, dripping with sweat and seawater. Erwin nodded, and the man hurried off. The storm wasn't receding. 

Before he left, he said: "If you're willing, I'm sure there are crewmen in need of your services."

 

* * *

 

Levi understood the misstep, slight, immense, a second too late. It was but a breath. It was a gulf and he'd jumped right inside, eager, without a second thought.

He understood what he saw then, the crippling guilt, the crushing, unavoidable shame. He, too, had taken his share. He, neither, would not have allowed anyone to call him a good man.

But monsters didn't spend their years, however how long, saving souls already lost, didn't turn their heads before a helping hand, didn't shy away from a softer word, an unexpected care. Didn't hope for change.

Didn't steel their words, yet never more, to keep a single man away.

Distantly, thunder roared, cracked like dry twigs under an invisible weight. Levi held on a bookshelf briefly, but he didn't need it then. He'd meant every word. He hadn't misstepped.

He watched the shivering crewman, panicked and drenched, rob him of his voice; Erwin, of his torment. Then, the man was gone. Then time once more stole him away. Levi remained amidst fallen bodies of wood and paper, alone with a silence so loud it would have split his head, until the rumble rose again.

Urgency hit him at once.

The doctor fumbled out of the room like his feet had forgotten how to walk. He made for the surgery office without thinking. White streaks lighted the way in turns. Crewmen came and went from their quarters, hurried. Levi's mind was elsewhere.

“Officers, watches are suspended, take...”

Erwin had not asked him to go. Had never refused him. 

“...required in the engine room.” 

“Pressure's dropping again.”

“Fuck. Been a while.” 

Erwin simply went.

“Doctor, this way,” Nanaba hushed, taking Levi by the arm to the other side of the hallway. “Mind relieving me for a while? Gotta go see the boys down here. A few injured, nothing too serious,” she said, all too fast.

The doctor took the needles he was handed and he watched the open shoulder before him, supposed it couldn't matter that stitches never were his favourite. He went to wash his hands as quickly as he could, and he let water ground him where he was needed; cold, then colder.

He would hear him when he paused. Wonder melted the ice in his voice, clearer each time, almost as if he'd surprised himself. He'd surprised Levi, too.

_I didn't expect you._

 

* * *

 

Seawater pummeled Erwin as he crossed the deck and slipped onto the bridge. The door was propped open to allow the endless stream of officers ducking in and out to direct crewmen. Erwin laid a passing hand on a pale junior officer to reassure him before finding Mike listening intently to a pair of soaked engineers.

Mike looked up and motioned for him to come.

Erwin greeted the men before turning to Mike. "What happened to skirting this thing?

Mike looked as haggard as he sounded. "The storm turned. We're punching straight through it. Better one night like this than three."

"Fine. Where do you need me?"

"Everywhere."

"The passengers?"

"Sent a few boys to make sure folks were in their rooms, haven't heard back. If you could find them-" He hesitated. "-or have a faster way of making sure everyone's where they should be, I'd be much obliged."

It wasn't the angered ocean that chilled Erwin then. "I'll look for them," Erwin said, and left before he gave another thought to the way Mike had finished his thought. 

He came to the central hallway that ran through the center of the ship. Hearts beat wildly all about him, but Erwin's true range had lessened dramatically. He could catch hardly a fifth of the ship at a time, if not less. Before he'd taken Levi's blood, he heard them all. Now, he could barely even tell them apart. 

He passed through the ship and listened for stray hearts to coral back into their rooms. He found one of the boys helping a crewman, and the other clearing debris that had knocked into an elderly passenger.

Erwin stopped by his store of animal blood in the brig, unlocked the chilled container and threw it open with barely suppressed fury. He'd taken too long to secure the passengers. Before Levi, he could have heard them all from the center of the ship. Before Levi, he tired less, felt less. Before Levi, he was useful. 

He needed to flush this poison, overwhelm it. Erwin swallowed the rat's blood with palpable revulsion and raced back to the bridge.

Mike was noticeably less calm. He did a fair job of hiding it from the officers, but Erwin knew the straining neck, the snapping orders. He took Erwin aside as soon as he made it back. Everyone buckled as the ship surged.

"Find-" Mike grabbed onto a support beam as the ship righted itself on a starboard pitch. "Find passengers who know their way around an engine, any engine."

"What's going on?"

"I'm burning through engineers-" He paused to relay orders at passing officers. "Find the chief first. Ymir will tell you more."

Erwin turned on his heel to leave but for the hard hand at his arm. He turned back. 

"Listen to me carefully," Mike said, "Do not stop the engine. Our best chance out of here before daylight is to ride a few rogue waves, but if we enter them at any less than full power, we'll be upside down and inside out."

"We'll be roasted first," the chief barked when Erwin made his way into the ship's boiling heart. "The cooling circuit's knocked out from his last joyride a few minutes ago and we need all hands singing lullabies to these Babylonian-era valves." She wiped sweat from her brow. "He wants full power? Maybe when he tosses me a coin for a cylinder or two made  _after_ the fall of Constantinople."

"Captain's orders," Erwin pressed.

"Captain's orders," she sneered under her breath. "Know what? Tell our captain he can have full power when I see twenty big handsome men haul water in and out of the cooling tanks."

Erwin abandoned his coat and vest to the heat and rushed to the cabins to direct the able-bodied to the engine room. Those who recognized him from his rounds with the doctor volunteered immediately.  

Having seen the fresh sores and burns on the engineers' arms and faces, Erwin flagged down a crewman and bade him direct several medics his way to treat the afflicted. 

When he returned to witness the engine room operating at full efficiency, the heat was insufferable. People burned faster than they could work, faster even than they could be treated. Erwin directed crew to tear away curtains, sheets and spare uniforms, and drench them before wrapping them around each broiling soul. Soon, people fainted outright. Erwin heard the first thud and raced to drag them out into the adjoining room-turned-infirmary before the man was lost to the frantic feet of engineers, medics, crew, and coolers. He spotted Levi and Nanaba among those treating the burned. Mike must have sent the whole division down here.

Violent pitches and surges sent water streaming out of buckets. Screams rose with the smell of burning flesh. Men passed out, and their heads and hands were trampled by unsteady feet. Arguments broke out, inflamed by the torturous heat. Too many waited for overworked medics and impeded the coolers' path in and out of the engine room.

"Attention," Erwin called, striking a spare pipe against metal plating to raise heads. "ALL engine room occupants will now work in five minute shifts. Any attempted heroism and your pay WILL be docked." He ignored groans. "Medics: Suspend the bedside manner. Disinfect, wrap, and move on. And until further notice, consider all persons with pails, jugs, and buckets divine royalty and move out of their way."

Their efficiency spiked, and their coolers enjoyed a few cheeky bows and salutes from the crew, but there was no winning this war of attrition. Erwin realized too late how dearly dehydrated their coolers and engineers would become after just one uninterrupted hour of this work, and though he established a supply line, many of their first volunteers were simply unfit to stay on their feet a moment longer. He and Ymir directed the flow of bodies in and out of the engine room until they, too, decided to work in shifts to allow the other to breathe. 

At the third hour, Erwin felt his own head swim and his feet stumble. He ducked out of the lower level both to cool off and make another run through the cabins to gather any more passengers who might assist in any way. Hange had long since joined the medics in treating the wounded, and Moblit had enough experience with engines to lend his support in the engine room proper. Children raced past to fetch water from the ship's stores.


	22. Chapter 22

  
Sweat fell from the doctor's brow, red staining his hands and arms up to his turned sleeves. He only knew to sanitize and stitch and bandage, soon could not think of anything else, of anything at all.

A few boys became a dozen became too many to count until it made no sense to send them up deck to be patched up. Every able medic followed the rumbling captain's voice as he gave the order, arms and rattling carts full of clean cloth and lotion and thread, down the ship's fuming entrails.

Minor injuries became burns became clogged lungs, barely breathing. The thread wasn't helping anymore.

The nurses and surgeons were joined by a few capable passengers, fellow doctors; not enough, too much for the cramped space. Levi knew Hange had taken a place somewhere at his right when he heard them ask how long had the party been going on for without them. Elbows bumped as they worked in the dark, seeing only for the glow of the flames, each trying not to steal the neighbor's light.

Tools slipped between blood-soaked fingers. Medics poured alcohol on each other's hands in turns not to lose the time it would take to properly wash them. It reminded Levi of another lifetime, yet even then he'd had sunlight, fresh air.

When Erwin's voice rose above the sound of hissing steam and clunking metal, all moved at once. Minor injuries became priority, small wounds treated first; oitment slapped onto raw flesh between cuts of coal-stained fabric, or perhaps it was ash, like it changed a thing. Then men were sent back into the inferno.

Levi knew the minutes passed only for the coming and leaving of the injured before him. He recognized faces, not-engineers. Young men. Before long, children.

Some came back once, twice. Some couldn't leave again.

 

* * *

 

Mike watched the black, roiling ocean as his helmsman wove in and out of steep valleys and sudden peaks. He'd chased and caught a good few rogue waves, but they weren't nearly large enough for them to cover as many leagues as they could. The chase itself strained the Maria. Several lifeboats had broken free, and with nearly all the crew playing life support to the ship's frantic heart, they had slipped off the side and showered into splinters against the battered hull.

Ymir had sent couriers, likely behind Erwin's back, demanding that he lessen the strain on the engine. He sent them back. Ymir loved her work. He didn't begrudge her that. He did, however, prefer a charred ruin of an engine at port to a pristine one at the bottom of the sea.

"Captain."

He turned. Nanaba, red-faced, swaying, and swaddled with damp fabrics, stumbled toward him.

"Nan? You need to be down in the-"

"This one is from Erwin." Her voice was small and unrecognizably hoarse. "He sent me so you'd know he's serious. We can't keep going."

Mike watched the waves. Black on black. "We won't need to for much longer. The rain's lightened. The clouds have begun to break there," he pointed at starlight. "And there. Right there where we're heading-"

"Captain-"

"And if I can catch just one more-"

"Mike," she said, harder. "Erwin says you have thirty minutes-"

"That'll do." Blacks on black on black. 

"I didn't finish. He says thirty minutes til we shut down. I say ten before we start losing crewmen. Would you like to decide who to widow first?"

Mike struck the window frame with his fist. It was all black.

"Well, captain?"

It was too black. Mike turned, demanding his officers examine the missing sky.

"What do I tell them?"

The officers froze, one after the other, before furiously debating heights and leagues. Mike couldn't see the stars anymore. 

Nanaba watched, bemused, as the deliberation rose in intensity before Mike cut it short and turned to her.

"Five."

"And then?"

"Shut it down."

 

* * *

 

Supplies were starting to run low; no one thought useful to remark it aloud. The doctor wondered if it would ever end. He did not know if he should wish that it ends.

 

* * *

 

Erwin couldn't suppress his surprise.

"You know, Smith," Nanaba said with a half-serious glare, "He wasn't much of a gambler before he met you."

Erwin shook his head sympathetically as he moved a delirious man out of the engine room and passed him on to a medic. 

Five minutes. Less, if taking into account the time it took Nanaba to return. He demanded everyone's attention. "Everyone must immediately lash themselves to the ship or else grab onto anything to brace against-"

A piercing explosion rocked the engine room. Before his eyes had entirely regained focus after the pop of white, Erwin spotted Levi ducking in and out to drag from the flames those closest to the door. As others joined in the recovery, Erwin found Ymir among those who had been in the room. 

"Pow'r it down," she slurred as she struggled weakly against Petra. Open flames poured out of the engine room. It was untouchable now. 

"Please, you're concussed," Petra implored. 

"Erwin," Ymir called as if she hadn't heard. Her eyes were unfocused. "Buddy, we've a blown cylinder. Anoth- minute of this an' we're all done. We'll blow a-a hole in th' ship."

Erwin turned to Nanaba. "We can't let him make the jump."

"By the time I get up there..."

Erwin quieted his pounding heart. "Ymir," he called. "Ymir, stay with me." Her head lolled. "Ymir, how do we-"

A hand was on his shoulder. "Sir." 

Erwin turned to an engineer who had escaped the worst of the blast. He limped and wheezed and wiped blood from his brow and yet looked the best out of those precious few who still remained on their feet.

"Right, uh, under the cracked cylinder's pressure gauge is a valve system." He stopped to cough. "It'll isolate the damaged component from the rest and buy us, I don't know, a few more minutes at full power-"

Erwin faintly registered Levi turning his head. "Where is it?"

The engineer shook his head. "I don't envy the fool you'll be sending in." He coughed again.

Erwin took him by the shoulders. "Quickly, man."

"Opposite wall. Not far, but there's a precise sequence."

 

* * *

 

He felt the explosion, walls shivering, limbs trembling, before he heard it.

Levi's world should have ended at the threshold of the door, should have been dedicated solely to helping the poor souls out of the place, out of the flames; to the too few lives still hanging at the tips of his fingers.

He had looked across the fuming no man's land.

He had seen the minute shift.

He could not tear his eyes away from Erwin's face.

 

* * *

 

"Captain, there's something you should see."

-

Erwin had grabbed an armful of damp fabric from a passing crewman and started winding it around his hands, arms, and head. He lifted the man's protective eyewear right off his head and fixed it on himself. "Tell me."

"He'll need to-" The man stared, only beginning to realize what Erwin intended. "Sir, you don't mean to-"

-

Mike's jaw slackened. As they approached, the Maria's lights began to illuminate the tower of ink. Towers. There were two. They were perpendicular. The Maria chased one. The other chased her. 

-

At Erwin's look, the man rattled off the operation sequence, one that wasn't complex but just lengthy and nuanced enough to make a return trip increasingly unlikely. Though he didn't intend it, Erwin exchanged a look with Levi as he listened. His face was indescribable. 

-

"S-stay the course, captain?" the helmsmen asked. The bridge had fallen into absolute silence. "Captain?" 

There was only black. 

-

Nanaba, having busied herself with the injured, had only then turned and also understood what Erwin intended. "No. No, wait-"

 

* * *

 

Levi grabbed her by the arm before he could think. He too wanted to keep Erwin back. They couldn't keep Erwin back. Not Nanaba, not him. Not any wall of fire, not any expanse of sea.  


Nothing could.

 

* * *

 

Mike relieved the helmsman and turned the wheel with all his might. He'll ride them both.

-

Erwin disappeared into purgatorial fire. 

 

* * *

  
The doctor closed his eyes for no longer than a second.

The next, Erwin was gone.

He'd been swallowed up in the flames, engulfed by the light but Levi knew that he wouldn't have volunteered if he couldn't bear it, surely his body had already endured it, must have burned before, and he cursed how the thought of asking him or Hange had never crossed his mind, could never have crossed his mind, how he didn't know.

Time stopped. Levi saw people scrambling around, Nanaba holding on him still like she couldn't rely on her feet, before she straightened and called for help, broken.

Time would not stop, they were reminded when the ship swayed again, harsher, floor inclining dangerously until it would nearly give out and Levi heard the waves crash against the hull above, louder than before. Deafening. The doctor held on the doorframe, white-knuckled. Behind him, Hange called back. Levi turned briefly. He had not seen Moblit in the room, had not seen many people at all. He didn't look again.

Levi watched only the fire. He watched until he thought he had gone blind, until he could not trust his eyes anymore. He saw a shadow. He could no longer tell what he saw.

Then, he felt a pull at his bones.

 

* * *

 

He held his breath. Erwin resisted the overwhelming urge to shut his eyes against the flames, though even then, he couldn't see farther than his own hands. He waded through flame and steam until he found the blown cylinder. Gauges hissed and popped all around him. 

Crew ducked in and out of the room behind him to gather any others thrown by the blast. Erwin braced himself on a searing pipe against the sharp bucking of the ship as he turned valves and levers in the sequence he'd been given. He needed to wait for the pressure to drop before sealing off the component or else risk an even larger blast. The thick fabrics he'd swaddled around his bracing hand dried and threatened to ignite. 

His eyewear clouded, blinded him. He threw them off. He needed to watch the gauge. His eyes itched and streamed in the steam.

His lungs protested, but he couldn't take another breath, not yet. He needed to make his one clean lung-full last.

When the pressure finally dropped past a safe threshold, Erwin nearly released his hand to turn with both. He scrambled to hold on. The floor was vertical. He was hanging.

-

An officer called out. "There's too much starboard momentum. She's lost." 

The captain lashed himself to the helm and watched the remaining tower race alongside them. 

-

Erwin dodged the flight of loose tools and plating. Thuds echoed from every corner of the ship with the coordinated slide of people, rigging, and equipment. Heart-rates spiked in unison. He couldn't believe it. They were capsizing. 

-

The captain shifted their bearing with minute adjustments to the wheel.

Another called out. "There's no righting her!"

-

Erwin completed the second half of the sequence one-handed as his other broiled against the pipe. At its conclusion, his let his charred hand slip and himself fall against the wall-turned floor, flinging the last of his air from his lungs and quickly breathing another through the ragged filter of his shirt. He groaned against the searing equipment burning through his back and arms as he rose to his feet. 

He'd meant to wait until the water in the cooling tanks had boiled past usefulness, but at this angle, it wouldn't matter. Their only hope for prolonging the buoyancy of a capsized ship of this size until aid arrived meant trapping air with an intact hull.

Erwin spotted the shutdown console and began to climb. He'd abandoned all but a few scant layers of fabric that hadn't yet charred or ignited. His hands burned. His right, with which he'd gripped the pipe, was unresponsive, so he used his forearm. His eyes swam. 

-

The space between the Maria and the tower disappeared. Mike tightened the knot around his waist.

-

The engine room spun. 

Erwin's lungs screamed as he gasped hot steam at a single moment of sudden, pristine weightlessness before being thrown across the room. Debris and equipment followed. He couldn't tell one burn from another.

-

The helmsman looked green. The officers cheered a little hysterically. 

Mike maneuvered with frantic orders to crew and adjustments to the rudder to prevent the vessel from pitching too far in the other direction. 

The winds lessened, and the rains had stopped. They could see the stars. Muted explosions rattled the floor at their feet.

-

Another cylinder popped, and a third. Erwin couldn't breathe. The shutdown console was right there.

He reached out. His right arm hung, lifeless, from his elbow. It was right there. 

Erwin tried to call out, but his voice was gone. The room melted into a pastiche of warring reds. He thought of that second dance.   


* * *

 

Levi fell when the floor turned.

Distantly, he heard screams leave exhausted throats, sounds of metal against metal, then wood, cracking, or it might have been bones. A cart hit one of his leg at full force, the pain blinding white, so white he could not tell which one was hurt. He saw others around him, ones who did not have his luck.

The ship righted herself after an infinity, a few seconds. The second shock hurt more.

Levi tried to duck even lower than he was on the floor, under shock, under the fog, crawling further away from the steam-powered hell. Nowehere was safe. He did not have the time to wonder if the boilers were designed to resist so rough a surge, nor how burning coal felt against the skin. An explosion diverted his panic before that. Then another.

Then it all ended.

The doctor's ears took long moments to get used to the mild noise, the near silence. He saw though dust and tear-filled eyes as Nanaba pressed against a crewman's arm. Another had an iron tool lodged in his chest; he was left alone.

Levi cast a glance to the heavy fumes that hid the blown-up machines. Erwin had not come back.

Someone called from the other end of the room.

“Shut it down!”

“No, wait, we'll lose all power-”

“Cylinders blew, pal. Unless you got another steam engine hidden in your pocket, it's over. We gotta shut it down, now.”

Levi limped over to the sound of the voices, realizing only halfway through that he could still walk. The two engineers he found could not.

“I'll go.”

-

He saw the remnants of dried blood first.

The flames had died down just enough that he could see everywhere they'd burned, from the ground up to blackened metal shapes, hollow, torn apart.

He saw the man on the floor next, unmoving against a wall, and his heart spiked.

Levi did not have the time to ponder or worry, or do anything else than shut the machines down as fast as he could, ignoring the flaring pain in his bones. It didn't pull anymore, didn't ache. It screamed.

His knees hit the ground next, blessedly; he could not have held up much longer.

Dust covered Erwin's face. Underneath, red burns, flesh in the place of skin. Levi turned him slightly, gentle; moved the limp arm covering his mouth and lowered his ear there instead, holding his fingers to a wrist, searching for any sign of a pulse, for half a breath. His own heartbeat pounded in his head so loudly it drowned any sound Erwin could have made. Briefly, he wished they could share.

He turned the man over on his back, so he could lift him up. He saw it only then. Erwin's right arm was gone. Torn apart. He could not have noticed where he'd been laying, on the wrong side. He should have noticed.

Levi's insides rolled.

He did not know how he rose, how he walked. Someone asked after him and he did not hear who. He couldn't feel the pain anymore. He couldn't feel a thing. He held Erwin tighter.  


-  


Nanaba had already started rounding the remaining few who could still walk to bring the injured up deck first. The captain sent the remaining personel to help. Then, they moved the corpses.  


-  


Hange walked after the doctor, catching him with a hand on the shoulder when their calls went unanswered. They asked without words. Levi didn't know. He only nodded.

“Let's take him to his room. He'd prefer.”

He nodded again.

-  


The remaining medics were exhausted. The night hadn't ended.

When the cabins weren't enough, the common rooms of all three floors turned into makeshift dispensaries. Patients were sorted by their injuries, from engineers' perforated lungs to passengers' concussed heads. The walls buzzed with hushed murmurs, cries. At times, panic would rise as if a wave.

A little girl who decided she felt well begun to read to her neighbors, as they waited and waited and waited.

-

  


Erwin's lungs would rise, weakly, but for now it was enough. It had to be enough.

Levi watched the room not to watch Erwin. It felt bare. It felt like trespassing more than he'd ever known. It felt wrong to be there uninvited. It wasn't the only thing that did.

He'd tended to the wound on his own, had stitched up the stump. He'd washed him as best as he could, alone, then had slipped through the door to fetch his own salve. He had wanted to do it alone, could only bear to do it alone.

Hange came back within the hour to observe the healing. They could not come up with any comforting words.

“How's Moblit?” Levi asked.  


“The same. Still breathing.”

-

Bandages stocks ran dry. The surgeons boiled bedsheets, then cut them into strips.

-  


The captain's second asked for able men again, and Levi almost went. He knew he could be more useful elsewhere, could even get his own wounds checked. His leg glowed. He couldn't bring himself to leave.

-

  
He asked the next time Hange came.

“Think it'd help if I...”  
  
“I don't know,” they cut in. They knew. “Last time... Hasn't stimulated his healing responses.”   
  
Levi's breath was knocked out of his body, like a fist to the chest. Dread crept inside, filling up every nerve instead.

He had not thought of Erwin's capacities, had not known they could change. None of them had.

Before the previous night, he had not even known about them.

He had been so eager. Foolish. He had not wanted this. Never this.

“Hey.”

Hange went on when he didn't answer. “He's alive. Healing might be slow, like Mob's is, but he's still healing.” They paced around the edge of the bed, avoiding where Levi was seated on the side, and he was grateful for it. “There's no telling. Might help. Might not.”

Levi crossed his arms, then uncrossed them. Tiredness buzzed in his fingers, his eyelids. He didn't have the strength to think.  
  
“Either way, I'll be back.” Hange would not stay. They sounded restless. “Let me know what you do.”   
  
Levi's eyes fell to Erwin again. He brushed a strand of hair out of his closed eyes. He could have been asleep, if not for the burns on the side of his face, his hand. If not for the thin veins marbling the skin, where the flames hadn't kissed.   
  
His only hand.   
  
Levi fetched his knife. The silver was spotless.   
  
The blade sliced into his thumb like it had the first time, the cut easy, confident like an old friend. A single drop of blood beaded at its end.  
  
The seconds fell. For the first time that night, Levi refused to breathe.

  



	23. Chapter 23

"I'm leaving."

The old man said nothing. A large bass flopped inside the burlap in the corner of the boat. Erwin's knuckles whitened on his rod. 

"I'll visit."

The old man caught another bass. It was smaller than Erwin's. 

Erwin turned around and helped him unhook it and dropped it into the sack. "I've saved enough to skip town. I can start small. Apprentice with a merchant. Travel. I can be normal."

"You want to be normal?" The man suddenly asked.

"Yes. Yes, I want," Erwin breathed sharply, overcome with himself. "I want this to have been a bad dream. I've already invented a history for myself. Three, actually. Would you like to hear?"

His teacher didn't answer. Erwin considered telling him anyway before deciding to let it go. An hour later, he caught another bass, smaller. The light was fading.

"Will it make you happy?" The old man asked.

"Yes," Erwin said immediately, as if there had been no lull between them. "I promise, I'll visit every-"

"Don't. Forget me."

"What?" Erwin turned, scandalized. "You- what?"

The man didn't answer, but Erwin wasn't as patient this time. He moved as far as he dared to try to find his eyes without threatening the balance of the little boat. "What do you mean? Mister Zoe-"

"To this new you, I will only become a reminder of what you were. If you want to forget, then forget."

Erwin smirked. "I think I can keep two thoughts in my head at once."

His teacher grunted. "Maybe. But not two selves."

-

Voices garbled about him as if through water. In the time between one laborious, unseeing blink and the next, the room  glowed with a rising sun, then veiled in mourning black. He fell back into the void to the gentle rocking of the ship.

When he roused again, he didn't open his eyes. A heartbeat he'd taken for his own had really been another's. Someone had stayed with him through mornings and dusks. There was a familiar taste in his mouth. A familiar heart at his bed. 

It came closer. A cautious weight sank into the mattress by his chest. A hand smoothed away damp hair. He caught it and opened his eyes. He passed over a too-clean cut on its thumb.

"Unorthodox treatment, don't you think?"

Levi's eyes had widened and his shoulders tensed, but he otherwise made no move to pull away. 

Erwin loosened his grip. Levi didn't pull away.

He laid their hands on his chest, his bones sinking like leaden weights. It hurt to speak.

"Don't they teach you doctors to prioritize?" Erwin stared pointedly at the open sores on Levi's arms and head powdered with soot and dried blood. He frowned despite the effort. "You know I can fix myself."

He huffed a small laugh and raised what was left of his right arm, amputated just above the elbow. "Though I haven't had one of these in a while. This'll take a bit longer." 

He squeezed Levi's hand. "Especially if you keep poisoning me."

 

* * *

 

Levi's blood stilled. His veins turned to ice, fingers curling into the skin beneath his palm.

  
“Fuck you.”  
  
He couldn't think past the relief and the dread washing over him as one, couldn't have hidden the trembling in his hand or the pouding in his chest if his life had depended on it. He didn't attempt to.  
  
“Stop your heart often? Even Zoe thought-”  
  
It had delayed the healing. It had nearly killed him, but he hadn't known. He hadn't known.  
  
He wondered if Erwin had.  
  
“Unless you'd have liked that, being left for dead. Or, wait. Sacrificed.” Levi's voice dropped. “The good captain could've even sung your praises long enough for you to fuck off unbothered.” He didn't know what else to do with the anger. It should have been easier to ignore.  
  
Levi fell back into his chair but his hand didn't leave, could not. He breathed deeply, once, and he stared at the dull curtains across the room not to look at Erwin's face or the stump of his arm any longer; stared at the bed, the walls.   
  
The sound of file on bone still echoed deep in his teeth. He held on too tight.  
  
“If it's poison you wanted from me, you should have said it. I would've done it right."

 

* * *

  
Erwin smiled, ignoring the stiff pull of the hardening burns on his face. He pulled Levi's hand, pressed his palm to his lips. He didn't know why, knew only that it felt right.

"You couldn't have known. And all I had were suspicions."

People passed by the cabin in a hurry, always in a hurry. He recalled the cut on his hand, now both gone. 

"I wanted a third way," Erwin said, head spinning. He couldn't tell between what he spoke and what he merely thought. "To keep the convenient parts and remove the uncomfortable ones." 

"There is no third way. I think," he looked away, into nothing, "I've been chasing a child's dream."

When he came back to himself, Erwin gave him the combination to his storage box. Levi scowled, but Erwin insisted he was no use to anyone bedridden. He'll need to drink it all.

Hange stopped by later. Levi wasn't in the room, so Erwin took the opportunity to contest their hypothesis. The doctor was no bond-mate in any way Hange tried to define it. His blood removed the growths but prolonged regeneration. Ignoring it incapacitated him. Consuming it rendered him blissful past reason, past self preservation. Levi was his first and only natural predator.

The doctor didn't look at him when he returned, and left the room before Erwin could start on the last of his stores.

The growths returned within the hour. His pain lessened. Breathing didn't hurt anymore.

If he hadn't taken that drink before heading into the engine room, he wouldn't have lived. 

He rested for another hour after Hange helped him remove the growths and cauterize the sites. When he could walk without aid, he made his way to the bridge.

Mike dropped three concurrent conversations to bound toward him with outstretched arms before hesitating at the sea of gauze on his skin, calling him a son of a bitch, and pulling him in his arms with as much deftness as can be expected from a towering ship's captain.

They were adrift. Though control of the rudder ensured they wouldn't be buffeted entirely off course, the engine room was damaged beyond their ability to repair. Simply waiting for a passing vessel was out of the question. Their food stores were already stretched to accommodate their extralegal passengers, and medical supplies were not keeping up with demand. It wouldn't be long before crew and passenger alike succumbed to something as simple as infection.

"There's one boat," Mike said. He propped his elbows against the rails on the open deck. "One hardy enough for the full day and night our messenger will need to pass at sea between us and port." 

Erwin shifted as the shadow of the raised bridge let him move closer. "Haven't you sent it?" 

Mike set his jaw, and then Erwin understood.

"The refugees."

The ship manifest was still intact. They would be apprehended and deported. They will have suffered this voyage for nothing. 

"Yeah," Mike said. 

Unless the portmaster became inexplicably wealthy overnight.

"I'll go," Erwin said. He rubbed his shoulder. "Preferably with a rowing partner."

"Gonna bail me out one last time?"

Erwin frowned. "Last?"

Thuds and shouts echoed behind them as the crew secured loose rigging and bailed seawater out of the flooded decks.

Mike glanced at him. "We had a good thing. Last night, I-" he stopped. He canted his head. "Come here." 

Erwin thought he misheard. Mike motioned again at the sunlit space next to him. Erwin slowly felt for the hat inside his coat, fully aware he was being examined. Soot ballooned from its threads before scattering in the wind. Erwin wore it and stepped forward.

Mike watched him with an inscrutable expression. He then reached, unmistakably, for the hat, and Erwin stepped back. Mike scoffed and leaned back against the rails, as if it made no difference to him. His heartbeat, to his credit, corroborated.

"When I tell folks about the things we get up to out here, the things you've done for me, they don't believe it. The ones who do call you an angel. Others, Lucifer." He clicked his tongue. "Not much in between." 

Erwin didn't understand. "You're spooked. A little shore leave and you'll be right back-"

"You lost an arm, Erwin."

"People have lost their lives-"

"And I've paid my respects to the last man. But they're not you." A long moment passed. "I think I rely on you more than I should."

Erwin smiled ruefully and tapped his right shoulder. "This was a fluke. I'm hardier than I let on."

Mike didn't smile. "I wouldn't have approached the rogues if you weren't aboard. I wouldn't have done a lot of things without you. The good and the bad. And everything in between."

"Erwin," he said before Erwin could speak. "If we sail again, I don't think I can keep myself from asking how you do things like stand on two feet just hours after losing an arm."

The door shut softly behind him. Erwin gathered his things in a single case, ears faintly ringing, forgoing clothing and replaceable things for a cauterizing kit arranged by Hange and, despite his protests, a vial of their own blood. It didn't help that they called it a snack. Resurgent growths already strained against the gauze. He never imagined he'd miss them.

He tried not to think about Mike. Maybe it was childish to think either of them could pretend forever. 

His range returned, too, so he knew well enough who had paced outside his door for several moments, knew who finally turned the knob.

 

* * *

 

The wooden doors gave way with a creak. Levi retrieved the box, vials clinking, and he marvelled that they hadn't shattered in the storm, had resisted long enough to offer this small mercy.   
It could never be his again. This blood he brought didn't hold promises of a weakening heart, of a fallible body. The glass felt lighter for it.   
  
Levi did not stay in the cabin longer than he had to afterwards, didn't wish to see. Erwin's eyes wouldn't seek his own or fall closed like they had under his hand. His palm stung at the memory of chapped lips.  
  
The first empty washroom on his way turned out more than suitable enough. He couldn't say how much time had gone by since the storm had passed, how many hours, how many centuries.  
  
Levi watched the man in the mirror, and the man watched back. He had his eyes. Deep shadows carved his face, dirt and grime settled deep into the lines of his skin. Blood had dried in his hair. Someone else's. Levi stopped looking.   
  
The burns marbling his arms stung under the weak flow of water, and still he blessed that it wasn't the salted sea.  
  
The doctor wrapped his own wounds, sharply like they were an inconvenience. He repressed a hiss when clean cloth fell on his back, though no one else was there to hear it.   
  
Rows of laying patients and families sitting along the walls were the only sight that greeted him as he passed through the salons. There had been balls held there once, though none cared to remember it. The only daring steps were taken by the medics passing through the injured now, scraping the bottoms of empty bottles, pouring the last drops of medicine.  
  
The leg could wait. It all could wait, could do nothing but, in every corner the ship. She hadn't moved an inch.  
  
None remarked on the doctor's earlier absence; he helped arrange the removal of the bodies as if to make up for it. It had to be done fast. This burial wouldn't be as solemn as the last, could not afford to be. The captain himself came up and secured a tiny portion of the deck. Sheet-covered corpses hit the waters, one after the other. Some of them had no names. The captain nodded when the last of the ghosts had drowned, solemn, and they rejoigned the living.  
  
Levi's nerves flared up again. It wasn't the water in the air.  
  
He caught Hange near their room, and he didn't ask about their personal stock of painkillers. Didn't ask about him. He offered to check on Moblit if he wanted, anything to distract himself from the unknown that settled, the pain in his steps. Hange suggested he goes back to visit Erwin instead.  
  
The door stood more imposing than it had been mere hours before. Levi had never hesitated with him, had never allowed it. He hesitated now.   
  
He entered without knocking.

Only this once Erwin turned when he came in. The doctor had seen many men come back from the dead; them and Erwin shared nothing. He supposed it was practise.   
  
The man looked like himself again, assured and composed like it had all been but a walk. The missing hand alone betrayed the singularity of the time, the roughness of the trip, yet his eyes were clear. His eyes part sky, part sea.   
  
Levi stood, his back against the door, crossed his arms as he observed him. He gestured to the suitcase, voice light. “Think everyone'll fit?”

 

* * *

 

"If only," Erwin said. 

He hadn't planned on seeing Levi again so soon. Maybe he imagined he could simply set off and postpone wading through this particular miasma he'd safely locked away in his head. There was no time for it now. Ideally, not ever again. He'd spent far more time navel-gazing on this trip as it was. He only regretted that a good man was swept right along with it.

Erwin snapped the clasps of the case shut. "The portmaster will need a financial incentive to conveniently overlook the refugees." He motioned with what remained of his arm, unused to its absence. He supposed he'll need a crewman to be his right arm.

His one hand remained on the case, his head down. He felt the pull of singing blood all over again. Every inch of him begged to stay a little longer, to step a bit closer.  

"Thank you. Hange told me it was you who pulled me from the fire." 

He took the case and headed for the door. 

 

* * *

 

“Fuck's sake.”

Levi grasped his good arm when he was within reach, and he didn't care that it was the arm holding the case, that the case fell. He only cared that Erwin stilled.   
  
“Yeah,” he said. “And cleaned your wounds and stitched you up and watched that you fucking breathed, though I guess I shouldn't have bothered.”  
  
Perhaps he even enjoyed the faint surprise on his face, the smallest hint of it he couldn't hide when he had been so prompt to conceal everything else once again, like some part of him hadn't expected Levi, never expected Levi.  
  
“Didn't come to hear your thanks.”   
  
But Levi hadn't rehearsed his good luck wishes and safe return biddings. His hand came up to Erwin's face, to the side, where the flames had branded him the reddest. His fingers barely brushed the skin. The burns had almost disappeared.

 

* * *

 

Erwin flinched at the shadow of Levi's touch.

He hadn't come for thanks. Knowing him, he didn't care for apologies either. Erwin knew better by now than to assume Levi meant to extort him or otherwise intend him harm. 

He didn't know what Levi wanted, why he was here, why Erwin was given preferential treatment, and he was tired of feeling like the last in the world to understand something he could have sworn should be simple, must have been simple once. Levi knew what he was, knew, if only in broad strokes, what he'd done. Levi's other hand tightened on his arm. He didn't know what he wanted, why he gave and gave. All Erwin had to give was sincerity.

"I wish you'd be happy to be rid of me," he said. 

Before Levi could speak, he added, "You were right. I hate to think I could be welcome anywhere." He unfolded his fangs. "As this."

 

* * *

 

“I know.” Levi's hands tightened further, at the sight first. Then at the memory. “You won't risk it.”

He thought it strange, how he too would have wished he'd be happy to forget Erwin, and how he wasn't. For a frightening second he held the thought, terrible, that he would never be.  
  
He had wished he could have seen Erwin as an enigma, as a problem to be solved or an answer to be found, instead of this persisting ache in his veins. He had wished for many things. All he knew now was that he had looked at those fangs, and he had always seen a man. All that still mattered was that he could show Erwin too.  
  
Soon, he would sail to shore. Soon he would be gone for a few days at least; if the man rowing was slow, perhaps a few more. Levi might as well speak now.  
  
“But you don't have to." He paused. "If you want to try the human thing again...” It was the same as the first time, didn't have any reason to be more difficult than the first time. Levi's hands fell. His eyes didn't. “Gathered I can help with that.”

 

* * *

 

"I would've begged for it, once." Erwin stepped closer and spoke lowly, as if speaking any louder would whisk his nerve away. "I wanted nothing more. Hange and I deliberated for years...and I'll have to disappoint them, too."

 "Or - I don't know. But I'm no use to these people as a human. God, it would be the height of narcissism to trade one for the other."

He thought of Marie. He'd not had the time to appreciate the world after drinking her, had focused only only on the run, on the burial. He'd thought the heightened smell of the earth and pain of asphyxiation were products of grief, of adrenaline. But it was Marie's blood. It was Levi's.

"I admit, I thought humans silly. All their passions and furies. I couldn't understand it." He inhaled with a shudder. "And then, after we...I stepped outside. I could smell the sea. The electric air. When I was cold, I shivered. When a man burned, I wanted to destroy that engine, wanted to take it apart right then and there as if it were just a toy. And when I was done, I'd roll up my sleeves and bully away the rain." He gave a shallow laugh. "I thought I was losing it. How do you do it?"

 

* * *

 

“Scary, huh? The range of the thing. Some days it makes it worthy getting up in the morning. Some others it makes it hell.”

Levi could pretend all he wanted, he was no one anymore. He'd lost. He'd lost a lot. It was expected in times of war, or in this one other line of work, yet it could only happen so many times in a life, then it would all be over, inevitably.   
  
“Some days it makes you give a man your blood without asking for shit in return.” He smirked. “And offer again the next.”   
  
But Erwin. Erwin had lost everything, a hundred times over, and he still kept on going. He still held the infortunate's hand all the while telling them he didn't have a heart. He still spent his days seeing that the poorest live, and he did so with his head bowed down. The shame troubled Levi, but the deeds didn't. They fascinated him. Humbled him.  
  
He had never known anyone like him.  
  
“You feel more stuff than you think, Smith. Might be you don't know if you should.”  
  
Levi held his gaze, searching. The man was closer now. Within reach.  
  
“Mind if I ask... How long since you've last accepted something without wondering if you deserved it first? Since you've last done something only because you wanted to?”

 

* * *

 

Erwin laughed softly. "Now ask me if I've ever touched the sun." 

But that wasn't entirely true. He felt Levi's hands lace through his belt loops, felt himself drift closer and begin to admit to himself that it was never blood alone that drew him to this man.

"But maybe I have. Once, I think. In recent memory. I assumed it was selfless, but I don't think so anymore." His hand rose, slowly, to Levi's neck, his jaw. Levi didn't move away. 

"I think I just wanted to."

 

* * *

 

Levi inched closer, lifting his head into Erwin's palm, the hold of his fingers. He wanted to ask him how bad he thought it'd burn. Him, the want, the sun.

He watched the man's eyes on him, the softness there that wasn't caused by any drop of his blood. One of his hands came up to his waist, then to rest on a hip. He whispered. “Think you'd want it again?”  
  
Levi heard not a word before he felt Erwin come to him, gentle, in place of an answer. Before his own breath hitched and he was so close his sigh died against Erwin's lips. Before he let himself fall, knowing that he'd be caught.

 


	24. Chapter 24

Erwin gave him his answer.

He reached to embrace him, to draw him still closer as their lips met, and too-late remembered the arm he no longer had. Levi must have felt his tension, seen his eyes move to confirm what his mind had not, and wrapped the loose sleeve about himself. 

"I need to go," Erwin said, though he moved down the line of his jaw, his ear, his neck. He couldn't stand the heat radiating from the line of his body, couldn't move away from the heightened pulse beneath his lips. He could do it now. He could.

Levi moved away and met his lips again, only to bite hard as if to punish him for lingering. He licked at the bead of blood.

It would take too long to search out the rest to say his goodbyes. They couldn't float for long. 

Erwin descended the rope ladder into the boat and nodded to the crewman, and then turned to a figure he hadn't expected to see.

"Don't look too upset," Moblit said as he took the other oar. "You'll have your turn."

 

* * *

 

He might never know how his blood felt on the man's tongue. Biting him in turn tasted darker than it should have, sweeter than it should have. It tasted like iron and one thing more not to utter aloud.  
  
The boat chased the horizon, until the horizon was bare. Levi turned away from the porthole and walked back midship.

In a matter of days, he would forget the way the wind or perhaps the currents had pushed at the wooden bark as if to attempt to divert its course, how it had done the same to the Maria, how it must still try. How, no matter the size of a ship, she would yield before the oceans, if the oceans willed it.  
  
The light dimmed fast after that. Levi watched Petra wrap his ankle and ask what in the world had taken him so long, and he spoke of the reports from the nurses, of the remaining supplies.  
  
The ghost of lips on his own and fingers on his jaw and warmth at his nape remained, long after the man had left. He should have asked about the sun, if only to know how near was enough, if it ever was.   
  
He dreamt of weathered men on a sailboat, reaching land.

 

* * *

 

 

The ship had long ago been swallowed by the horizon. 

Erwin took inventory while Moblit rowed, then relieved him after a time. it took a little while to establish an equilibrium without the counterbalance of his lost arm, but he made it work. 

They ate whenever it suited them, slept whenever sleep took them. They were comfortable strangers. All hissed when seawater scored sores. A sheen of sea salt clung to their faces, their clothes. 

Erwin's range improved into the night. He could hear the hearts of cuttlefish and basking sharks. He passed a hand through cool waters. 

The shore rose with the sun. It was faint, and rippled like an unreal thing. 

He never thought anything so obstinately unyielding as the earth after weeks at sea. 

When they docked, the crewman left to brief the port master as Erwin stopped with Moblit at a bank to pick up a single note. When they approached the port offices, the man himself came to meet them at a brisk trot. Mike and he had crossed paths more than once. Before the man could think to make his insinuations, Erwin passed the note into his hands, made it abundantly clear what would happen if a single passenger was detained, and left the way he came. 

He showed Moblit his and Hange's lodgings after accompanying him to a clinic to properly dress his burns. They were modest, but close to their university. Erwin regaled Moblit of a dean he quite liked, insisted that Dot and Hange had even corresponded favorably once or twice, and it was only when he put pen to paper to write down his address that Moblit understood that Erwin did not intend to stay.

Moblit said so aloud and in a way that intimated that he might have known before Erwin himself that their working relationship was over.

"He's already signed the sponsorship papers," Erwin said, watching the docks from the window. "Truthfully, he'd always resented me for convincing Hange first. In any case, I'll leave you both with enough to go about comfortably with or without a sponsor. Hange will be bucking against the university's arcane rules soon enough, so I don't expect-"

"Hange came here to study you."

"No," Erwin said immediately. "We both knew it was a temporary thing. I made sure they had other plans, grander ideas. And they do. They can do much here. They can change the world."

"Because they changed you?"

Erwin watched boys tail carriages and hitch rides on their backs. He could hardly hear their hearts. There were so many in this building alone. Every apartment exceeded capacity at least twice over. Somewhere, between the fifth and seventh floors, a drum stopped beating.

Moblit moved to the window and watched the streets with him. "You would have avoided the doctor to the end of time if it weren't for them."

Another drum beat stopped, this one across the street. It made little difference. The sound remained cacophonous. It was not like the hearts of so many gulls overhead or minnows below. There was no rhythm to it, no melody. Not in a place like this. Erwin left the window and threw on his coat.

Moblit's heart spiked. "Wait."

"There's an inexpensive diner a few blocks from here, Sandy's. And a bar across the street."

"Where are you-"

"5C and 8J are former passengers I smuggled across before. Give them my name and they'll assist you with whatever you need."

Moblit followed to the end of the landing as Erwin left the apartment and descended the stairs. "What will I tell them?"

Erwin hesitated, briefly. His shoulder ached. "Nothing they don't already know."

Erwin made another visit to the bank to put his finances in order and stepped out into dimming streets without a penny to his name. 

 

* * *

 

The doctor arranged the vials by name, then he sorted the day's letters; payment notices for the most part, a patient's invitation to a party. He did not read it. 

He'd remained ready to depart to the other side of the country the moment anyone found him there, but no news had come from home. There was no one left to write of home. 

He had not wanted to use the money at first, pride glaring enough to make him refuse the gift if it was devoid of a single word, goodbye or else; but he had needed it sooner than he would have wished, and he'd promised he would reimburse to the last dime when he could, to himself, to no one in particular.

Hange admitted they could never give it back if they used it, not in this life. Levi wondered about the next. 

Perhaps he had long known how the very second the unbreachable walls of waters would give way, the man would go. How he would compensate whatever he felt he owed in excess, and he would do so hundreds of miles removed, ever without a glance.

Levi might have waited for a letter for a few weeks, months; imagined catching a glimpse or a shape or a shimmer at times when he crossed the avenues before they started to become familiar. He wouldn't have been surprised if the man had come to chat, pleasantly, as if it had been nothing. 

He imagined less and less. 

- 

It hadn't been a lie. The place was alive, everywhere and always, in ways Levi hadn't known. It breathed fumes of coal long before dawn. Hooves clanked on the pavement beneath his small appartment window in the dead of the night; during the day, tenfold. 

Levi stayed on the side to watch the ball of society waltz before his eyes, to bear witness to the city when it cast its light upon any man, any promising man, a rich merchant or a rich merchant's son and it made him shine and it turned him gold. When it refused, it hid families in the shadows of crumbling buildings, left them to be found only when illness had taken to the last and the rent went unpaid. 

It wasn't war. It was subtler. 

- 

The practice had been empty more often than not at first, weeks of stuttering work and dashed hours until one day a ship arrived, then another, and those in need would somehow always come and find the way to Levi's door. 

- 

"He doesn't know."

The doctor visited a handful of times, the small rooms suffocating some more with each visit. Hange had come back from a week in the labs; Moblit spiked their three cups of tea unprompted. Levi didn't touch his own.

"He doesn't even know, the captain. Ever thought we should do something about it?" Hange asked, in a low tone that had nothing to do with the whiskey.

"No." Levi didn't care to have the conversation.

"Well, I have. Just to try? You were pretty convincing bait once." 

"If he wanted to be here, he'd be here.”   
  
He did not know what possessed him to speak in the man's name, as if he'd known.

“Hange was so close to drawing a conclusion,” Moblit begun.

“I was,” Hange cut before turning to Levi, “I still am. And you... Don't want to?”

“It's been a whole damn year." He stirred overbrewed leaves floating over the water.

"Then of course, I suppose it wasn't a test subject to you."

"But then why would the doctor..."

 _It should have been,_  Levi didn't say,  _I wish it had been_ , Levi couldn't say. "It was nothing."

All he knew anymore was he'd peered behind one man's walls, once, that he'd scratched at them blind but somehow just the right way and fate, ever cruel, had looked at this man and him and all of them and had nearly swallowed this man, and him, and all of them. Then fate had spit them back, then fate had gone away.

Alcohol burnt Levi's tongue. It tasted like fumes, like limbs torn apart. He wished he could have regretted some of it, any of it, for even a second. 

-

Curiosity had him out often, looking.

He watched as machines and engines, immense ships were born from the ground, from nothing, fast. He watched as man reinvented himself, forgot himself, faster.

 

The rush of blood came to tingle at the oddest times, the thrill of the chase creeping back. The knife rested against the doctor's leg, at all times first, then only when he left the house. The blade dulled with unuse, the handle only held to be polished.

Restlessness had Levi's fingers drumming over his chair too often, his desk. He thought of that poor bastard on the Maria's promenade deck, offering him a coin for a job quickly done or merely a bet, and he wondered if he should seek out anyone who resembled him, if it would take the edge off himself, if it would suffice. 

-

An old woman came who spoke his mother's tongue. Levi clutched the bottle in his hands harder, watched his roughened fingers. He didn't find his own to reply.   
  
There wasn't a way he knew to release the broken backs of workers from their burdens, to advise rest to exhausted mothers' eyes. It remained unchanged in sun-kissed houses and the bellies of ships alike, across every road built over invisible sweat and expandable time.  
  
All the houses in the world, and all the ships.  
  
-

Papers came from Europe faster than they'd ever arrived to the Empire with no regards to the distance they crossed.

Moblit extended an offer to study for Hange for a short time. When Levi asked who he'd bribed for the university to accept a stranger with nothing to his name, he assured the doctor's english was more than good enough. When pressed, he conceded it wasn't official.   
  
Hange needed help with blood. Not his, he added.

-

Time didn't stop its course for him. Levi was thankful. The first little boy he'd seen upon opening the practice turned five in the spring.

-

The gatherings deigned not become more bearable with time, yet curiosity alone was worth the sacrifice. Knowing the right people opened doors, even when those right people upset administrations and exhausted rapidly thinning resources, broke endless lists of rules so often the doctor wondered not when the two scientists would be kicked out, but what for. Yet Hange's genius fascinated, yet Hange needed to keep their mind busy, busy at all times.  
  
The chatter rose, murmurs about those several types of blood at once, those several types of illnesses, the entire audience sporting wide-eyes to observe those of the others and Hange still didn't care that any of their peers celebrate the find, didn't care that some praised the work and pitied their very person in the same sentence, didn't care that their name was even mentioned. They were busy.  
  
Levi always passed amongst sharp suits and sharper laughs unseen. He wondered if news traveled as fast as papers, or faster; if it had already come to one recluse ear's how science was coming to know of the subtleties of blood, learning to read its humors and heal its diseases. If he avoided it.

-

Grey light filtered through the curtains of the small kitchen when the doctor left. That morning he rode alone to the outskirts of the city, then further. He tipped the coachman more than was necessary for his wait, and he walked until he saw man no more; only rocks, the shore skinned to the bone, baring teeth. He caught the wind rising, the sand in its wake. The horizon stayed still. 

He could go and chase the scalding sun of the south. He could breach through the snow that never subsided. He could roam unbound.

At nightfall, he rode back home.

-

He still saw it sometimes when he woke, the boat pulled ashore once the storm passed, the first steps on the ground, and no eye on the harbor to catch his own.

The ache would come back, weak, as if to mock him. He didn't know why he still felt it, still thought of it between his quieter breaths. He didn't know why it wouldn't leave. It was just the sea.

* * *

 

It was inordinately difficult to start from nothing. He'd kept it all, from the pittance he'd been tossed not a day since rising from the dead from a passerby who'd taken him for a beggar, to the interest pouring in every quarter and every year. Now it poured for three. 

A visionary was untethered from the grant-hunt. The good captain, from the moorings of the port authority. And a doctor, from anything at all.

His work will be continued. Erwin had only expanded his operation in earnest when he discovered how far sympathetic captains were willing to look the other way, how thin a passenger manifest could be with so full a ship.

Though he'd known it and seen it done unto others, it was a different thing entirely to himself be treated the way he was for the crime of an empty wallet. But he didn't need it, never needed it. He'd been around people for so long that pretending to be human came as naturally as breathing. He doesn't eat, doesn't sleep. 

But he was never a good recluse. It was difficult not to make friends as he moved west through Detroit, then Chicago, difficult to look away where injustices bloomed. He changed his name. He gave his labor to titans of steel and steam and then took it away, took it all away from them, terrorized scabs, and helped good people bargain back their dignity, their lives. It was good for him. It was enough, for a while.

He could darken his hair and grow a beard but he couldn't sand down the arch of his nose or char the blue of his eyes. When one too many ask whether they'd seen him before, whether he bore any relation to a gentleman named Erwin Smith, he politely assured otherwise before taking the first train out of the city.

He stopped at small, isolated farms dotting the Sunbelt. The unnerving vastness in this stretch of country was unlike the unbroken oceanic horizon he'd greeted to the end of the century. He worked here and there as a farmhand and pretended not to listen to the radio, to the sounds of brittle alliances and not so brittle shipyards.

He gave away a year's wages to the first town beggar who crossed his path and moved farther west, moved higher, and didn't say that he was paid far less than he knew was fair to herd a man's sheep from one mountain swell to another. He refused the dogs at first - he learned the terrain before inquiring after the job, and he would hear a wolf's heart many miles before it heard his flock - but the boss insisted, and as it happened, the company wasn't all bad. The wolves-blood, too, was a welcome change from that of sickly city rats. He did the job again the next year, and the one after that.

In the fourth, he left for the sea. 

He fished for blood in the Pacific on a boat bought from a mariner's widow. In the beginning, he returned to visit her and the small shops by the pier. In a few weeks, he wouldn't return at all. He became content with the sea's beautiful, unquestioning, uncaring tenants. 

The sea was content with him too, for a time. It was, until a great cyclone ripped through the waters and overturned his little boat.

Erwin shot red flares for a few days into the blinding blue. He was too far from frequented waters.

So he dove, unclasped a rod from its berth, and caught as much as he could in the hour before the hull sank entirely. He drained his catch of its blood and dove again at dawn. This time, he wouldn't stop until he met land. He hadn't gone too far out to sea, and he was sure he knew the area and its landmarks well enough to find his way. 

It took some doing to find his rhythm with only one arm. It hadn't grown an inch in years but to stitch itself closed. Veterans and comrades and neighbors alike would ask "Which war?" and nod knowingly when he answers, "All of them", when he means, 'none at all'.

He rested on his back whenever the beating in his chest threatened to split his sternum, but after nightfall, the gentlest waters wouldn't calm it. He was running out of blood, and he'd rather not resort to baiting sharks. 

So he drifted. He caught and drained whatever nipped at his heels and occasionally turned over to stay clear of anything with teeth larger than his own. His one hand he passed over his skin to warm himself now and then passed more and more over bone.

Maybe penance was best served here, where no man tempted him and where he killed only to sate himself. Here, where he was no more important than the kelp that tangled over his arms and legs or the waters that pulled him further and further out to sea. 

He didn't know when he'd shut his eyes, but when they opened, he felt heavier than he ever had, and his cold, smooth waters were a pair of rough wool blankets. From the groan of wood to the pitching floor, he gathered that a small boat had found him floundering. Only two hearts beat near his own.

Sitting up was a more trying ordeal than fending off a starving wolf. The muscle he'd spun in the mountains had all but melted away, and his hand and feet were still swollen from such long and uninterrupted submersion. He couldn't even say how long he'd drifted.

The vessel's captain checked in come evening and let Erwin know that even his thready heartbeat only barely convinced him that he was not yet a corpse, and as he spoke, Erwin's fangs descended and pushed at the cage of his human teeth, and the tremor that possessed him was so great that his vision swam and blackened from it, and from the human blood he hadn't smelled in weeks, hadn't tasted in years. 

He left the bed and stumbled out of the cabin, in any direction that led him to sea, but his savior was too kind for his own good, too rough, too insistent, too appetizing, and Erwin swung, and Erwin struck him unconscious. He didn't ask to be saved. A young man emerged from the cabin and approached with hands held out as if to soothe an animal, and Erwin could have laughed, would have said to this son or nephew or protege of the captain how right he had it, how this was the truth he always wanted, the truth he always imagined.

He struck him, too, when he grabbed his arm to stop Erwin from leaping before lowering himself like a dog to sink his fangs into his neck and would that Hange were here to watch him lap at the deck, would that the good doctor could see the scarlet pools and think him good and kind and human ever again.

He rummaged for anything sharp and used the utility knife he found to cut a shallow but convincing line from one hole to the other before compressing the bite with a strip of his own sleeve and pulling the man into the warmth of the cabin. 

Erwin swam to shore and strode among them like he'd never been on his knees, smiled fully as if he'd never had his fill of them, listened as if he couldn't hear the rising heartbeat of yet another of their wars.

He wandered again, but he'd since lost the will to work for even the most handsome wage. He didn't need it. He didn't want it. He felt nothing for his own feeble attempts at philanthropy. Those who needed would always need more. He didn't need. He wanted to simply be. 

So Erwin followed the first handsome gentleman who crossed his path to the warmth of his bed and took from him a teaspoon, little more. He licked the wound shut and scaled the manor walls to taste another and a third and yet another until he knew family by their blood, knew where they toiled and what they ate and smoked and drank by the drop on his tongue. He dined on the pacific coast well past when newspapers warned of some mystery insect for one week and dermal parasite the next. 

By summer's end, he knew these cities better than they ever knew themselves. He knew all their scandals and intrigues and histories, knew the gold miners from the oil hands from the whalers. He paid little mind to the public hysteria he knew would pass when the marks faded, and dozed on a train before taking the pulse of sun-kissed Reno. He won't ignore his appetite again. 

 


	25. Chapter 25

The doctor didn't leave. He had finer clothes now, stark white creasing at his wrists, at his throat. He hadn't needed dig a grave with his own hands to conceal the making of his own hands again. 

  
_Rashes reported N-W . Not an outbreak yet._

 _G._ _  
  
_ When anyone asked, he would say he had made a life for himself here, that he could not wish for anything else. When anyone guessed otherwise, they pretended to believe him with knowing nods and frantic smiles, eager to agree. He'd learnt those of his kind weren't allowed to remember too much, or miss the sun.  
  
_Mercury has been delivered. New dosage show results._  
  
To foreign tongues he had come to tell the truth. In turn the mute uttered words, and they spoke of faraway lands and foreign skies with clouds passing in their eyes. They knew to come back to him if they needed it. They did. Levi lent a jar here, an advice there, and they returned with stories.  
  
_Solution can be kept in the usual bottles. Conservation still unknown at this point._  
  
It wasn't friendship, not even company. Some passed ahead in the practice from time to time, never stayed long. Some sent letters of few words about the local conditions, health, diseases. The doctor had eyes and ears across the city. Soon, the state.

_Will schedule other rounds in the area._

Levi didn't consider it philanthropy, not for a second; it was survival, his own, fear, others. It supplied Hange with test subjects and results to observe on their own terms. It gave them a shot at smothering tragedies, as if a few pairs of hands could reverse the order of the world, so long as they willed it.  
_  
Several subjects have already been seen reselling. G._

The doctor crumpled the letter once he'd reached the bottom of the page, and threw it in the fire.

  
-

 

"Listen, I know what you're going to say, but hear this-"

"'Fuck's sake."

"I was at the labs earlier - I know I shouldn't have, but I really needed to see those little bugs die with my two eyes, wouldn't you do the same? Either way, I went to the refrigerator rooms to fetch some vials I'd rather not have anyone else find, and you know how I'd left his blood there while I worked on it? Don't make that face." Hange smiled, expectant. "So, I retrieved it."

Levi raised one eyebrow. "Congrats."

"No, no, you don't get it... I retrieved all the vials. With the blood still in it. It's been in front of my eyes all these years, I can't believe I didn't... It's fresh. It's as fresh as it was when I first bled him." They stared.

"It's been five years."

"So it's special, what's new?" Levi spoke of it with mild disinterest now. It had come slowly.

"Must be a reason somewhere in those cells. Imagine if I can isolate it. Replicate it. We could finally store blood. We could have endless supplies. Even have blood libraries."

“Without a lab?” He asked, pretending not to know the answer, that he wouldn't have given the same one in another time.

“So? I'll build it.”

  
  
-

  
He should not have wished for another grave to dig, not ever again. He had wanted easy things once, had thought it simple; live, or don't. He'd been little but another man's machine first; a physician to the second, a threat to the third.  
  
Levi wondered which he was when he scheduled the week's appointments knowing who would pay a bit more and a bit less, when he gave medicine to the poor one day pretending not to know they'd resell it the next because it was more urgent still to feed a child, when his own nails dug deeper into the flesh of his palms or his thighs for nothing had properly hurt in too long a time.

 

* * *

 

Erwin began to feel a familiar beat at his heels in at least two cities. Their heartbeat was stranger than most others. Poor thing must be ill. He'd heard that rhythm in those with hypertension.

He moved with more measured steps and spent several nights circling it until an opportune moment allowed him to approach his shadow undetected. 

He met her stride as she passed through an open market one afternoon. She mistook him for someone else at first, someone, apparently, who'd tailed her in turn. When she understood he was not who she imagined, they agreed their circumstance was just uncanny enough to deserve a stroll.

She was a traveler. A runaway. He understood the ragged clothes, then, the heavy bag, and the young face behind a blonde curtain. True to his ears, she'd been skipping cities and looking for work. It must have been a coincidence that their paths momentarily aligned. It may have even happened before with many others, those without such distinctive beats. It wasn't long before she looked away in disinterest, quickly bored with the conversation and with him.

He didn't hear that lonely beat again.

Erwin wandered east. It was a simple point of moving on from a feeding ground before suspicion mounted into fear. He knew enough to avoid the northeast, but when he moved south, his skin began to crawl. He moved with less care, drew more blood than he needed.

He knew why he was being drawn north. Still, he resisted. It could just as well have been the climate, or the different strains of blood.  

But on a brisk, autumn morning in a syndicated bookstore, he found, almost by accident, a familiar name in a medical journal.  It was a footnote in a short biographical section at the end of a long article about a persistent parasite that had been eradicated by a team of researchers in New York. Among them, a certain Hange Zoe had just put the finishing touches on a newly constructed personal laboratory.

He doesn't know how to react to the name. It was at once so familiar, at once so far away. The Erwin they knew didn't exist anymore. Maybe the Hange he knew was gone, too.

He left it all well enough alone, but in a few weeks, he found more news of their involvement in public safety projects. An admirable enterprise. 

But soon, a stray thought took root. This work, the reports intimated, was conducted at state labs with colleagues and public grants. There was never once mention of what went on at their own laboratory. It had sounded large enough when its construction was first detailed. Something didn't sit right. Hange wasn't a private person. They loved sharing, to a fault. 

Maybe it was narcissistic, but he couldn't allow it if their private research had anything to do with him. Their first attempt had been more than enough to convince him this wasn't an avenue he ever should have encouraged. Still, he hadn't left them with parting instructions. The safety of the passengers and crew aboard that doomed ship was all he could think of when he'd come to shore. And when he'd toweled off and made every last arrangement, he was lucky to tell his head from his feet for all the revelations that hounded him.

It wouldn't hurt to visit. 

The city was as overwhelming as it had ever been. He'd gleaned enough from the journal to know where to begin his search. It didn't take long to find the personal lab, a part of a university campus. 

He'd long ago forgotten the rhythm of their hearts, but it didn't take long to be reminded.

He slipped inside in the early hours when the floor was empty altogether. It had taken some waiting. Hange worked overnight more often than not. The place was a mess, and would have been more so had Moblit not tidied up for a couple of hours after Hange had gone home. 

It was strange, being here. Hange and Moblit and all the rest were as far away to him now as the old man, as Marie. Figments of a past life. Characters in a storybook. If it weren't for their heartbeats, made familiar again, he'd almost think he dreamt them.

Erwin inhaled deeply.

Solutions and specimens sat sparse across the refrigeration unit, but he knew without looking what he needed. He'd have never found it otherwise. The unit had a separate door on its flank, and within it, a compartment visible only by the threadbare seams of a metal plate, invisible were the objects beyond it not so heady, so familiar.

He unclipped the panel and stole the vials away. Replacing everything as it was, Erwin left and dumped their contents into the East River. 

A part of him recoiled at the incivility of it, a part of him he ignored. He'd manufactured it when he thought he could live among these people. 

A too-familiar beat reached his ears. One he wouldn't forget in this life or the next. He left the riverside at once and retreated into the city proper, where even he could barely parse one passerby from the other in all the noise. The pull was stronger with proximity, but only just. He could resist. 

His diet was rich, now. Investors and maids, politicians and steel men. He didn't discriminate. For the first time in his life, he was sated. He was stronger, faster. He could hear a conversation at a dozen meters. The dark was not a dark anymore but a slight dimming. His marks obliged his most offhand suggestions. Some had even offered themselves to him at his touch. He could do more, be more than he'd ever imagined possible. He could have had this were he not so engrossed with playing house, with the fantasy of being human, of being small and being weak. He could have been this centuries ago. He could have been himself. 

He didn't survive this long by being reckless. He needed Hange's written data. Anything at all that mentioned his blood. 

Retrieving it would take longer. Though he was amused initially at the idea of sending a proper letter, maybe that was just the thing. The vials were his property, as was any data derived from them. They'd agreed to that from the beginning. But though the data owed its existence to him, it was a product of Hange's labor and intellect. He couldn't just steal it. 

The letter replaced the vials he'd taken from the lab. The data and all its copies would be taken to the roof of the campus building and placed inside a satchel he'd left beneath a stone bench no later than nine in the morning. With Hange usually arriving no later than eight, they would be sure to see it and have enough time to make the short trip upstairs.

If not, their day job was about to become much more difficult.

 

* * *

 

Hange bloomed in the safety of their own lab, the newly-acquired privacy liberating when at last no any ill-advised colleague came near to probe around their experiments or papers or person anymore. When they invited Levi to use a room or ten for the confidential meeting of those special patients as soon as they were available, the doctor didn't come.  
  
When they sent news of successfully replicating the blood cells some odd months later, the doctor didn't come.  
  
When they sent Moblit the next time for fear of any letter getting lost or found, and he explained in his best attempt at a convincing tone how they had gone further and how the cells wouldn't stop replicating and how it changed the very understanding of both biology and human medicine, the doctor didn't come.  
  
It wasn't his research to conduct or his war to win. Levi wished he could have forgotten that he'd ever stepped in the blood-stained scenery, that he'd ever been the witness to immortality by sheer luck or lack thereof, but Hange wouldn't stop reminding him no matter how many times he declined, and so Levi didn't stop declining.

He thought nothing of it, then, when an evening stroll brought his heartbeat to shorten, his pulse to pick up; when pressure played with his veins and trapped his bones in a way he never thought he would feel again. He must have become more tired than he'd thought. The river could be rising. The harbor could overflow.  
  
But come next day, forceful knocks hit his door not short hours after the sun had risen, and they were too loud to dismiss, and Hange rarely came themself anymore, Hange rarely had the time. Levi wondered for a moment if they'd fallen ill, if they'd exhausted themself too, but the tremor of their hands wouldn't ease, the urgency in their voice couldn't lie. When they asked, the doctor came.  
  
Hange paced across the room, hands disappearing in their pockets before they would come out again, tugging at a sleeve, at their glasses. Levi sat very still for balance's sake.  
  
“So what, you gave it?”  
  
“My papers ? No, no, I would never — I know it's him, no one else could have known which were the correct vials, but I'm not handing my life's work to a ghost, question of principles, if there's even half a chance it's a ploy from one of those uni wankers again... Not with this.”  
  
“Hold on.” Levi stared. “You would if he came here to ask directly?”  
  
Hange shrugged. “Sure, why not? Might make him happy to see how far it's come. Don't worry, Mob keeps hiding extra copies, says I could very well put the lab on fire one day which is absurd because I very rarely use heat but you know what he says?  _Still_. So, he can have my copies if he's so badly curious it's made him come back.” They paused, and took a deep breath. “Or he can wait a bit more and read it in the comfort of his own home, wherever that is.”  
  
It was Levi's turn to force a breath. “You're publishing it.”  
  
Hange nodded. “He's not named or anything. But there's the raw data, the entirety of the research process, the potential uses for human medicine, all of it. It's too important to discard like this.”   
  
Levi toyed with the note in his hands. He had one of those, too, one he should have fed to the flames. He kept it among patients lists and long-gone names but it didn't belong tucked in any file, hidden in any book. It belonged to floorboards underneath closed doors, to silence.  
  
He felt anger rise at the memory, at the methods and the man; couldn't bear to read again the exceedingly formal tone, the demands. Suddenly he was back on the ship, back to chasing the invisible and back to wishing he could catch him between his fingers one day, only to watch him slip from his grasp disappear the next. Levi knew Erwin would come again then, driven by fear or his own ire. Levi also knew he, himself, would be the one to bite.  
  
He folded the note and slipped it in his breast pocket. He would go home and burn the both.  
  
“How long?” he finally asked.   
  
“I kept half a vial of blood at home to see how it'd fare. Just as well, actually. Cultures grow so fast it won't even be a problem. So... A few weeks. Still needs to be proof-read. And the formatting is shit.”  
  
“How much sooner if we split that between Moblit and me?”  
  
Levi already imagined the fall when Hange's face lit up in relief.

 

* * *

 

Erwin couldn't say he didn't expect it. He'll make them understand. This wasn't a request.

Though he knew Hange would never publish even a morsel of that data, there was too high a risk of sabotage, of theft. He'd so easily stolen the vials himself.

He listened to them in the lab and in their homes. Their movements after receiving his letter illustrated far more than they would have ever admitted. They moved into corners they usually passed by and lingered in places they never had prior. Checking on hiding spots, and looking for new ones. Under mattresses, behind shelves. 

He needed only to stand stark center in a room to follow the scent of his own blood, needed only an open window to know it existed where it shouldn't. He knew the vials he took weren't the last.

Erwin couldn't come to them in person. Five years was quite a time to root around in his blood and discover some way to entrap him. Five years was enough time to rethink a promise to a monster.

The dean of the biomedical department that hosted Hange took his coffee in every which way - never the same twice - and walked two blocks out of his way each morning to chat with an old friend. He was a heavy sleeper.

Erwin took a teaspoon that night. Then, with his fangs, scored a scratch into his own finger and held it aloft until a drop fell past parted lips. He'd discovered this part of himself by accident in a fist fight in Chicago. It terrified him, still. 

He hadn't planned on staying long in the city. He only needed to assure that he was dead to the world, in a manner of speaking. There was nothing else, no one else for him here, but for a persistent pressure-pull at the back of head he was glad to ignore. 

Erwin scouted the neighborhood around the campus in the early hours until he discovered an empty cellar beneath a condemned building. 

He buried himself beneath a layer of opaque sheets and broad wooden panels. It would have to do. It was dark enough, secure enough. He closed his eyes and became still, became a part of the earth emerging from exposed concrete. In the morning, the dean chatted with an old friend.

Erwin focused on his scent past when he would normally draw away. Too much of it would usually disorient him, even pain him at the temples. Usually, but not now. The connection was mutual. He focused and inhaled evenly until lights flickered on the backs of his eyelids. Until street signs became legible, until the weight of an old briefcase pulled at Erwin's own arm. 

Erwin coughed, and with him, his thrall. 

His steps echoed against stone until he came to a familiar door. Erwin - the dean - raised his fist, and knocked. 

Hange burst out and welcomed him in with great enthusiasm. Erwin willed his pulse to lessen before his vision wobbled and lost his connection. It was unlike anything he'd ever done, ever felt. He walked and talked and felt this man. 

But each thrall had their limits. If he acted beyond the bounds of what any one particular actor could reasonably believe could be his or her own actions and words, their suspicions would fray the line between them. Asking a mugger to leave had been more difficult than encouraging a young man to stride by a lakeside after a trying day. 

Moblit was there, which didn't present a problem. Levi was there, which did. The slow turn of his head and disbelieving stare was enough to assume he'd been had. 

But he wouldn't dare speak. One snide word to the dean - who was alive and conscious and still assumed he was the master of his own body - and Hange's position was in peril. No. He wouldn't do that to Hange, to Moblit.

Erwin - the dean - looked to Hange. "Now, far be it to hover over you like this-"

Their connection strengthened. Muffled words sounded less and less like they were passing through ocean waters before coming to Erwin's inner ear. The dean agreed with the sentiment.

"-but for the sake of my own peace," Erwin - the dean - said, "I've decided to come to each of you in this department and make absolutely certain that we don't even begin to repeat the Browning mess."

A few weeks ago, a professor from another university in the city was discovered gathering samples from patients without their knowledge. It was a routine thing, unfortunately, to salvage liberally from those without the means to take the institution to court. This professor's sin was to harvest from a senator's son. 

The connection didn't strengthen, but hadn't weakened either. 

Hange nodded rapidly and started speaking to their rigorous process before the dean quieted them with a raised hand. 

"I know you make volunteers sign consent forms in triplicate. My office is uninhabitable for it," the dean and Erwin said. The connection strengthened.

"Our highest priority is the reputation of this institution-" he started, and the world began to swim. Faces became distorted. Hange spoke, and all he heard of it was a faint rumble. The connection weakened. He was losing it.

Erwin had thought it an innocuous enough platitude. Hange waited for him to go on, but Moblit - what little he could see of him as his vision dimmed - now had a slight frown. No. This was uncharacteristic of a person who was willingly responsible for someone like Hange Zoe.

"-right after our commitment to innovation." 

His hearing returned. The connection strengthened as Hange enthusiastically agreed, as their faces stopped wobbling. Levi's eyes had finally landed on the dean's neck.

"Carry on, then," Erwin and the dean said, turning to leave, "and do at least try to honor verbal agreements."

The connection weakened again, but this was all he needed. He bid them a good day and left the room. 

The door opened behind him, but before the good doctor spoke, Erwin pulled out.

 

* * *

 

The man only blinked, rapidly, before he watched his feet. Then, he looked up to Levi at the door, his face puzzled.  
  
"Did you need anything?"  
  
From the corner of his eye, Levi saw Moblit frown, and he frowned harder. A shudder had ran up his spine that stopped itching only when he closed the door again. The sight of the dean had tugged at him, slight, in the way one single other had.

“All those clerks inhaling their own body weight in coffee the same way, or is it just this one?”

Hange was back to searching for some paper amidst a mountain of bound files. “All of those I've seen. They're scared shitless of another trial. I'd say their bosses hate losing the money, but it seems they're more afraid of not being invited to the fancy parties anymore.”

“Don't you think...” Moblit hesitated. “It sounded a bit like a threat.”

“Like he knew,” Levi added.

“What? No, that's ridiculous. No one does. Yet," Hange said, dismissive like it changed nothing if the whole world knew, because they will.

It changed everything if the whole world knew.   
  
The doctor crossed his arms. "Moblit's seen it too, but now he wonders if he should tell you."

"I haven't really-"

"I'm sure a handful of years haven't made you forget how it looked on my wrist."

Hange paused then. They turned. "You're saying he's come all the way here to feed on the dean?"

"I'm saying he certainly hasn't fucked off the second you told him to, and I'm saying we don't know shit about what he can do. I'm not sure he does himself." Levi couldn't explain the knots in his stomach at the sight, the fear that had nothing to do with forged paperwork or a looming trial. Something, all of him, was off. 

The doctor had considered his options for as long as he had been allowed; a short time. He had waited for the slightest sign, had contemplated every way he knew Erwin could hit back and tried to picture those he didn't even as he worked and breathed and slept. Erwin hadn't survived the hardships of so many years by excusing himself whenever he'd been opposed. He wouldn't have disappeared after seeing his request denied, bid them all a good night before he retreated only he knew where; not when the very thought of his blood being observed and studied and commented seemed like it would kill him, as if it could, as if it was the only thing that did.

He must have known every trick in the book. By his very nature, he could have written them all.   
  
"He felt like him."  
  
"Look, sure, we have a problem if Smith goes around biting the staff, not that I don't care-"   
  
Levi rubbed at his temple. It was less important than publishing. Everything was.  
  
"-be over soon and he won't be able to change anything about it anymore. Maybe you can feel it because he's bitten you too. Or maybe he transfers some abilites when he feeds. Are you suggesting I study that next? Or are you saying we should stop all of this mere days away from revealing one of the most important advances in modern biology, only because some uptight executive asked me to fill a form?"  
  
"That's precisely what I'm suggesting."

The cells spoke to Hange in their own way but the cells were a promise, a potential, weren't the man moving, couldn't compare. Hange hadn't cradled that face in their hands, hadn't held the weight of centuries on their chest and felt as if Erwin could very well move the oceans, the very shape of the earth. And he had trusted him then.  
  
"You know he could," the doctor went on. "You know he's around somewhere, trying to stop us, and you know he could do much, much worse than bring up paperwork if he wanted to. He'll want to."

The twin bites remained engraved in Levi's eyes.  His skin crawled at the thought of being right; of anything beyond himself breaching his mind, moving his limbs. They had said the same of his mother when she'd lost her health too quickly but her head last; the neighbors on the left cursing jinns, dybbuks, for the ones on the right, and he hadn't known the words, he hadn't believed their fear. Then his mother had died.

Levi had been content to ignore the harsh tongues, content to avoid tales and holy books and folklore of any kind to seek answers to the illnesses of the body, the mind, and yet in this instant it all came back to wind the breath out of his lungs and choke him blind. He tasted ash on his tongue.   
  
He had never seen the demons the man confessed to hosting, but perhaps Erwin had always told the truth, perhaps it was Levi who had been too eager to ignore it. Who had been wrong one more time. 

When Erwin would be pushed further, he could as well do it to him, to any of them. He could destroy their fagile unit from the inside, could have already started. Then the city, then the world. The little dean wasn't the threat. Erwin wasn't playing anymore. Levi told Hange that.   
  
Hange closed their eyes. "We're there. Come on. All we need to do is work a bit faster." 

Levi watched the typewriter stuck into stillness, the ink long dry, and walked out of the room. He wasn't playing, either.  
  
"Good luck with that."  
  
The door shut too quietly. Levi didn't leave the hallway before he'd heard Moblit warn of the work being sabotaged, of Hange being harmed; before he'd heard the depth of Hange's frustration in their sigh.


	26. Chapter 26

An old woman opened the apartment door and thanked her profusely as she took the offered medication, signed a delivery receipt, and paid less than a quarter of its market price. The dim light in the corridor fell on a pair of fresh, raised pin-pricks on her wrist.

"Oh, this is just the thing," the woman sighed. "My dear husband, he's so-"

"Yeah," Annie said, and left. 

A good half of her stops had marks a week ago. Nearly all had them today, or else tugged obviously at their collars or sleeves.

She returned to the clinic that night, shouldered past a full house jostling for appointments, and passed the flustered secretary to turn in the day's receipts in the file room. Their voices rang like klaxons as she thumbed through patient folders. All these people were marked. The clinic had flooded with them ever since the mayor ordered a public safety commission and declared a state of emergency. The clinic was rarely peaceful, but now, it was insufferable. 

Annie stilled and shut her eyes at the clamor. The headache wouldn't go away. Now, her chest burned as she struggled to catch her breath. The irony wasn't lost on her. The doctor was just through there. She could. 

But how she hated doctors. 

She pounded on a shelf and damned the man his precision. She could skim a drop or two of laudanum off the top of each delivery, a little opium here and there, but it wasn't nearly enough. Any more and he would know. He may suspect already.

The next day, she panted walking up four flights when she wouldn't have drawn a spare breath at ten. The day after, a stray breeze set off a migraine that forced her to an agonized crouch at the end of a crowded street. She refused all offered help.

At the end of the week, their secretary informed her that the doctor expected her. In an examination room. Annie went home. 

In the morning, barely after the sun's rise, another of the clinic's couriers met her at her door - a crackerbox shared with five others - and informed her that if she wasn't in the exam room when the place opened, she may as well not come back at all. 

She needed the job. The pitiful drops of laudanum. But she will not be examined. Not again.

Annie debated on the stoop just outside the clinic door until her deadline came and went. When the sun set, she was joined on the stone stairs.

 

* * *

 

"Enjoying the outdoors more?"

  
The girl didn't move, her head remaining firmly locked into her shoulders. Levi considered the dust-covered stairs. He sat, not too close. "From here, it almost looks like there's something you need."  
  
"A job." Her voice was rough around the edges. She didn't look up.  
  
"Right. One with access to dispensary shelves." It was one of too few reasons the doctor had found could explain why she came back in so sorry a state, and still refused to be seen.  
  
"I deliver what I'm told."  
  
"Not a doubt.”  
  
Annie was one of very few of the doctor's agents who had never been a patient, the only one who had never uttered a word about her life, any of her lives. She 'd silently risen and left the only time Levi had asked, and had never given anything but her name. He suspected it wasn't hers, either.  
  
She reminded him of himself, younger.  
  
They watched the evening crowd thin. She forced herself to breathe in sharp rasps. A nurse walked past and looked at them with more worry than standard medical concern required.

Annie waited until she'd rounded the street. "Don't need your pity," she finally said before she turned to look at Levi with grave eyes. "I only need -” she stopped. Her hair fell in her face. She turned away, and that could have been that.

“-information,” she said.

"Nothing a simple doctor might procure, I gather."  
  
Levi didn't ask if the senselessness she spoke of was in any way similar to her own. He'd had more than his fair share of unreasonable in these past days. Erwin. Hange. Annie. Erwin.  
  
"Someone who has what you need,” he guessed aloud. It wouldn't be something she could ask of him. It could be anything.  
  
"Could be."  
  
Levi watched her, trying to decipher a blank face. He nearly failed to see the problem at first, yet perhaps he was faced with the same. "So find them. Take it."  
  
"Right. Easy."  
  
"It won't be. But I've seen you fight." The clinic had its share of less subtle thieves. "You looked convincing."

"I don't want a fight."

"No one ever does."

He told her - in general terms - that he too chased a man-ghost. That he had gone too far with him, yet never far enough. That it hadn't been easy at first, and never less so than now.   
  
Another difficult breath shook Annie's back as he placed a small bottle of morphine on the stone between them. 

  
-

  
  
The man left hurriedly, inkstains still marring the sides of his hands. Hange bid him an excellent evening with the most cheerful voice they could muster, and hoped he'd disappear from the hallway before they reconsidered. They'd decided alone. They remained alone that night, too, reading the words they had seen dance before their eyes for so long, and tried to imagine what it could possibly feel like to discover the pages for the first time.  
  
The following morning, they no longer needed to imagine.

 

* * *

 

Vampire.

Paperboys hollered it, dockhands whispered it, and men in suits and too-thick glasses debated it beneath sun and moon and were too eager to prompt any and all passerby for their opinion of that peculiar little article in an obscure research journal that now graced every home and waiting room in the city today, in the country, tomorrow.

Erwin joked with the best of them about the publicity stunt, a last cry, perhaps, of a dried out, irrelevant research department on its final dime. Of course he knew nothing about the place, but he imagined even less that all this wasn't an intricately designed practical joke. Municipal and city papers ran the story into the ground, and by the end of the week, everyone seemed to have had their last laugh at the ghost story.

Another report emerged a week after the first publication. The full, unabridged report. Word of a private demonstration for the mayor passed his ear not long after, followed by an emergency municipal order to establish an investigatory commission to conduct a particular kind of search. A search of mouths, an investigation behind teeth. Few were joking then.

And when Erwin couldn't freely walk the streets lest he come across these roving, plainclothes hunters who take men and women at random - no one was convinced Erwin was the only one in existence, though he himself had long since made peace with it - and scrape their hooked brass pliers at their palates in judgment, only then did the whole of it all descend on him. 

He willed anger to rise first, but it didn't, never did or could. He tried to understand. The author chose anonymity and published on behalf of the department - presumably to prevent the sort of harassment one can expect from a finding like this. Someone must have stolen the journal, found the vials. Zoe, he learned from shadowing their dean a while longer, had made plenty of enemies. Bestowed with a fortune, they had turned down Pixis' offer and, to the envy of all their peers, risen without need of sponsors and grants. Envy curdles into hatred.

But he couldn't learn anything off the tempo of their hearts through a dozen layers of concrete, and shadowing the dean for several days yielded nothing once he learned that Hange had taken a sudden sabbatical. It meant nothing, still. There was a reason. Hange couldn't have done this to him.

Moblit tossed when he slept, in an apartment not far from Hange's. It took several days before his heartbeat slowed to that reliable deep-sleep rhythm, and only then, in fits and starts. Erwin is careful this time. He hid the marks near moles and darkened scars. 

The puncture he made in his own wrist was larger this time, closer to the artery. The dean had taken a single drop. 

Erwin returned to Moblit for three nights. 

He needed to know. More than anything in the world, he needed to know whether he'd made a mistake on that Cretan dock to trust a single person since he'd trusted and emulated and loved open, innocent, dear Marie. 

Moblit went about his morning routine as Erwin situated himself in the basement of his building and focused on that heartbeat until the face peering into Moblit's bathroom mirror was the man himself.

Erwin simply watched. Moblit finished shaving and made his way out to head to his day job as a local bank teller. Erwin waited.

At the end of the day, per habit, Moblit left not for his home but to Hange's. The apartment door shut softly. He toed off his shoes and left them by the coat closet near the entryway. 

Erwin almost missed Hange in that room. They slumped in a chair by a window, motionless, like just another piece of furniture. Even their hair resisted the cool breeze.

They hadn't exchanged hellos, had barely acknowledged the other. 

Erwin needed no more convincing. Someone had stolen the data and published it, and Hange, powerless to stop the iron heartbeat of academia, could do nothing but watch.

Erwin wanted to remove his eyes from Moblit's, wanted to knock on that door himself, as himself, and forgive them and beg theirs in turn for acting like the animal he was. Hange had made a deal with a man, and that's what he should have been to them, that's what they deserved. 

Erwin closed his own eyes and leveled his own heartbeat to begin extracting himself. A consequence of such a strong connection, he learned, was the time and labor required to remove himself without harming or alerting his host. He took one breath, and another, and felt the connection wither.

"I don't know how to say this," Moblit suddenly said as he approached Hange. Erwin stopped his efforts. He couldn't pull out safely while Moblit spoke. "But there's, uh, not enough stuff in here."

Hange didn't acknowledge him.

"You know, you...you really put any room through its paces after a day or two. It's been two weeks."

Hange blinked. Moblit rubbed his arm. 

"Did you eat today?"

Hange made a low sound.

"Sorry?"

"Yeah."

"What did you eat?"

Hange blinked slowly. "Food."

Erwin could feel Moblit's frustration. He felt it himself. Hange would miss meals constantly on the ship. But never out of desolation.

"That's enough. This isn't the end of the world," Erwin - Moblit - said. The connection strengthened. Erwin couldn't stand to see them like this. It did no harm to speak not through Moblit, but with him in spirit.

"I don't know how you can sit there," Erwin, Moblit, said. "There's so much more, so much else to do. You-"

"Do you think I did the right thing?"

Erwin didn't understand. But Moblit did. 

"It doesn't matter now," Moblit said. 

"Don't tiptoe," Hange snapped. "I know what you thought before. I want to know what you think now."

Moblit looked askance to compose himself as Erwin waited. Hange could be referring to anything under the sun. From taking a sabbatical to misplacing a certain journal in some common area for anyone in the world to chance upon. He started to pull out, but Moblit spoke again.

"I thought it was reckless then. Still think it now. And, uh, we're definitely due for a visit."

"Yeah."

"Soon."

"I got that," Hange snapped. They moved their hair from their face. It looked more unkempt than normal, but not in its usual way. There was a lifelessness to it, and to them. Erwin's heart pounded. 

"What would you tell him?" Moblit asked.

"You know."

"Do you?"

Hange made a angry sound. "Look, I'd tell him - what's it to him, anyway? Not a trace in years, and now that I'm on the brink, here he is like he'd just stepped out for a smoke? Yeah, I didn't think publishing it would set off these ghouls shoving their prongs into every other person on the street, but once all this blows over, they'll see, the... potential for...Moblit?"

Hange published it. They did it themself, did it knowingly. 

"Moblit? You look sick."

"No," Moblit gasped. Stars blinked in his vision. He steadied himself against the wall. 

Hange rose. "Why do you look like-"

"Keep going." 

"What?"

"Just- finish the thought."

"Not when you look like-"

"He's here!" Moblit whispered angrily. "He's in my head."

"Wh- how did-"

"Hurry before we lose him!"

Hange stammered as Erwin opened his own eyes in that dark, filthy basement and blinked away at his double vision. 

"I- I mean, we, uh, I-"

"We want to explain," Moblit said through gritted teeth. He held his head in his hands. Erwin didn't know how Moblit had known, how he was keeping him there. 

Hange collected themself. "Erwin-"

Erwin pulled out. 

Moblit had been keeping him there. Somehow, he knew what Erwin had done and had given no indication, had not even one solitary uptick in his heartbeat, to give him away. Maybe too much of Erwin's blood granted the host more control, more awareness. Maybe Moblit knew something he didn't. It didn't matter now. Erwin didn't give him another thought. 

Hange published it. 

But of course they did. This was the same person who had, despite Erwin's wishes, forced him and the doctor to meet on that ship while he was in a state to kill him outright, forced Erwin to meddle with another innocent who thought he knew the man Erwin pretended to be. 

Erwin stayed in the basement overnight. He couldn't deal with the roving hunters with the way he was. His ears rang. His heart knocked about like it meant to claw out of his chest. No will remained to memorize heartbeats and track movements and redirect and fool and tiptoe. He'd just kill them, impale them with their own unwashed pliers. He'd leave husks on street corners and flood the gutters with blood. He'd slay the mayor next, and then...and then.

There was no neat ending to the fantasy, no returning to what was before. If he gave in to temptation, if he revealed himself, there was no hiding anymore. There was only war between himself, him alone, and the human race.

Erwin noticed the doctor's nearing heartbeat nearly too late. He left the building through a side entrance and kept to empty streets. He couldn't chance upon him now.  Not like this. For years, he assumed the connection between them had been severed, but no. The doctor wasn't so lucky. 

He had a life, a calling. Hopefully, a family. The man he thought he knew didn't exist anymore. 

Erwin had nowhere to be in the evening when he wasn't feeding, and he couldn't trust himself to be careful tonight. There was nothing left for him in this city. In this century.

That night, he slipped into the university, found the unabridged report, and read every word. Plenty was left out. His name, history, appearance. Hange had made it sound like a brief, chance encounter. The public reaction, in hindsight, was to the colorful, editorialized digests and opinion pages in local newspapers by laymen reporters more concerned with selling papers than translating the study as it was. The study spoke of his one-item diet in the most clinical terms, and did not mention Levi at all. The bulk of it was biochemical jargon. If it weren't for the bites Erwin had laid carelessly on exposed wrists and necks, the report might have missed public scrutiny altogether.

The final section was different. It was less distant, and with little unintelligible jargon. It spoke of a world that might harness this line of everlasting blood. It painted a future for wounded soldiers, for stricken civilians. For renewed life on operating tables and emergency clinics. A piece of immortality to make the afterlife wait a little while longer.

Erwin put the journal down. He listened to the muffled bluster of a waking city behind the fogged windows of an empty lab. 

This was what he wanted. He'd hidden it away behind the rush to redefine himself, to live as nature intended, but it had never left. Yet without lifting a finger but to fill a few vials on a doomed ship, redemption was his. The culmination of this fledgling project of turning his blood into something all-compatible and everlasting would live on well past his unnatural life. His debts were as good as paid. 

But not with all these bites. He'd done enough damage to public perception of the report, and Hange's fortune could only stretch so far. They would need public grants for a project of this undertaking. They would need a clean slate. They needed time.

With the last of what little he earned over the years, Erwin drove upstate and hired a man for his silence and his hearse. Erwin modified the steel coffin to lock from the inside. No war-spilt blood would resurrect him this time. No heartbeat could slip through its impenetrable walls. An inferno alone would wake him. If he was lucky, he could wake to witness the end of the world. 

There wasn't a town for miles in any direction, and no roads but barely trodden dirt paths. Erwin dug for hours by securing the remains of his right arm to the shovel. The scars had healed, but he couldn’t tell if it had grown back at all in the five years since it had to be removed, couldn’t tell if it would ever grow again.

He left no letter, but he imagined what he'd say. 

Erwin lowered the coffin and locked himself inside. Another man he'd paid to shovel the earth back in and keep quiet about it would come soon. 

He closed his eyes and tried to remember how to sleep. He did it once in a toy ship, on a restless sea.


	27. Chapter 27

The doctor observed the bites, barely there. First, he asked how Moblit felt. Then he asked how he would know if it happened again, how he would feel if his thoughts stopped being his, if he stopped being at all.

Moblit barely had the time to hold Hange's arm before their hand could descend on the doctor; he watched him, dead in the eye, cold terror dripping down his face like wax, and said in the steadiest voice Levi had ever heard from him that he did not know, might never know, but if it was the issue, if he had no say, he supposed he'd still try.

Hange left the room shaking.

It was little work to give the order to any of his men, who would warn another, then another, used to the hastiness of his orders just enough not to question that it could ever be but another job. No silence was too expensive for Erwin's own gold. The man would know to enjoy the one cruelty, taste it on his tongue like fine blood, fine wine.   
  
Levi asked for shadows in the darkest places. He would have preferred to be there himself, everywhere at once. He would have split himself in as many pieces only to see the deed done, would have walked around every corner, peaked under every door. Asked with a dagger, with his bare hands. Levi could not be everywhere. Anger coiled in his belly like a wild thing; he waited through short nights for any knock on his door, fingers itching.

For hours, he tried to guess what Erwin would do. Had done. How much he'd wanted it. What he might have ever wanted, the noble and the crude and everything in between. How much worst he could do that Levi didn't know.   
  
He played the scenes in his head, saw the man the moment he closed his eyes. In one there was fear on his face. In another, surprise. Sometimes, only the back of his head, falling before he even had the time to turn. Levi played them all, so that he knew he could end it, quick, clean. He could get close enough. He'd will his heart to stop beating.

The doctor's eyes and ears returned, having witnessed unusual shimmers, heard whispers; it was never this impossible to put them into order. Everyone they'd met spoke too easily of blood and fangs, for a higer coin or for a fright. The odd request hid monsters now, the quiet bribing covered gods.  
  
Levi knew by then. Erwin wouldn't have fed this day nor any before, not since the paper, not since Moblit. It would have been reckless, even for him. The second the world caught him, it would devour him whole in its turn, tear his skin, dissecate his heart. Curse and cross him in the same breath, from fascination or envy. The world longed to catch him, anyone like him. Levi could not let it.

Levi wanted him most. He had waited for so long. He had waited years.  
He knew no monster who wouldn't hide then, no god who'd walk freely under the open sky. Of all the aimless words, he only retained those who spoke either of vengence, or exile. Of all the words a little soul gathered the most. She asked less questions than the others, but unlike them she'd spotted movement in the dark, had trailed fear like tracks.

When pressed to know if she was sure, she only shrugged. She asked if the doctor owned a shovel.

Levi considered the knife in an unnecessary ritual. The blade had been perfect, had been ready long before Levi was. He had never known the handle to fit so well in his palm.   
  
It had to be the heart. He would be satisfied then. He'd avenge a scientist, an unlucky bastard or a dozen. Foolishly, a long-gone mother, for no one else had. 

On the set day he left alone before dusk had settled, breathing tight but shirt pressed, as if to meet an old friend.

The trip of several hours passed in a haze. The distance was fitting, was not unlike Erwin. Heavy clouds had begun to gather when he arrived; the coachman went back as quickly as the road allowed.

The doctor's eyes didn't sway from the desolate expanse once he found the line where land met a darkened sky. There was a purpose to his steps again, a direction to his walk at last. The weight of finality in his hand and him, the weapon. High grass rustled under a breeze that muffled the sounds of his footfall. He crossed the clearing against the wind.  
  
Another man was there as Annie said he'd be, walking with his head bowed. Levi might have doubted the girl before. He trusted her then. He rounded the unknown figure from afar, stayed in his back. He approached unexpected. The poor guy would have been told he'd be alone; it was easy enough to kick for his knees to give way, for a little threat to scare him away in a messy run.  
  
Levi had a shovel now.

He sought the ground himself, approached the turned up dirt. He watched the wound in the earth, the coffin at its center. His veins didn't sing.  


The man might not been there at all.   
  
The man could have died. He could have been found, or he could have chosen the place and the casket and his very own fall. Levi imagined the immortal body laying there betrayed, never to return to the earth.   
  
He would have wanted to ask him if he'd at least felt free when he'd  given in to the pull of the void.

He took the leap.

The case was ice under the doctor's hands. There was not a lock to pick, not a single nail to rip off the pristine surface. Levi hit the metal with the side of a fist once, twice, and heard silence reply.   
  
He hit again. He waited. It wouldn't change a thing if nothing could breach the steel, not unless the lid was lifted from the inside. He couldn't wait. He hit harder.  
  
Until suddenly, it was.

There wasn't a way Levi could have prepared to feel it again, no matter that he'd tried. The casket opened as Erwin rose, his eyes searching the dark like they had a lifetime before, a second ago. Unchanged. Alive. Levi didn't think, tried not to think as he lunged to block any move, silver to the throat.  


It should have been the heart. It was always meant to be the heart.   
  
He'd waited, one beat too long.

 

* * *

 

He lay with no weapons, no riches, nothing at all but the clothes on his back and a spare button in his trousers.

Erwin's eyes shot open at a hard thud. Muffled was the scrape of a shovel, of hands, along the seams of the secured coffin.

It looked like his hired man was an opportunist after all. Him, or a too-curious passerby. Erwin couldn't hear any heartbeat but his own bouncing off the dark steel walls. He hadn't wanted to. He'd only wanted to sleep.   

The lid opened to a warring between moonlight and lantern before his visitor shoved it open all the way and pressed something solid to his neck, something sharp. Erwin couldn't see his haloed face in the dark, but he could hear him. He could always hear him.

"Doctor," Erwin said. "You've taken to grave robbing."

Before waiting for an answer, Erwin rolled and pinned Levi into the coffin. His knee landed heavy on his chest. His remaining hand caged his throat. Blood gushed from Erwin's throat and stained them both. The knife had clattered aside.

Erwin reached for it with the heel of his shoe and slid it across the coffin and into Levi's hand. The doctor swung. The metal slid between his ribs.

And there it stayed, there it hurt. But even Erwin knew, as his body screamed for relief, for revenge, and as his vision whitened in sharp bursts, that it had hit nothing at all. It took talent to sink a blade of this length to its hilt into a man's chest and nick precisely nothing. Yet the good doctor's heart beat as if he'd torn him in two. 

"What are you waiting for?" Erwin asked.

 

* * *

 

 

Levi hissed, holding on to the knife, nails digging white in his own flesh for the strain of his grip. His hands slipped.

It wasn't enough. He wanted the man's heart beating red between his palms, to hold and hold and never release. He wanted merciless things. Levi held tighter until he would bruise himself, needing to tear it all apart, pretenses and walls and skin; to leave a last mark to remember him by, to forget him with.

The wound spilled a scalding river between them, yet Erwin barely moved. Erwin would put the knife back in his hand a second time, a third, a hundredth. He'd ask again. He'd demand.

Levi breathed just once and lurched over with a beast's will, ignored the way his own heart would sooner break out of his chest, if he minded it.

A hand jumped to grasp at the doctor's hair as he pulled out silver, for staying upright or for purchase, and Levi wished the man had collapsed instead. It wasn't enough. It wouldn't be enough.  
  
His elbow met Erwin's jaw, the blow sufficingly blinding to throw the man off and rise over him again.  
  
A hand found his wrist when his hands found a neck. Levi couldn't see the blood trickle under his fingers, not the cut on a opened chest, not Erwin's face. He hid all of him in his shade; he watched all the same. Kept Erwin trapped, safer than steel.

"Why," Levi asked at last, lower than a threat. “Stealing bodies not fun anymore?”

He could ignore that the man had wanted, wished, asked for death.

“Got bored? Want me to help?”

 

* * *

 

Erwin laughed softly through the ache in his jaw. This was all suddenly, rousingly funny. Levi's hands were blood-slick on his throat and the heat of them was a bracing, welcome thing against the night's chill. He felt the coffin pool with his blood. He wondered if the gush of it was as deafening to Levi as it was to him.

"Yes. Oh, please," Erwin said lightly. His hand left the ones at his throat - they'd flown their instinctively - and rose unsteadily to Levi's face. Lowly and with no little mock-sincerity, he asked, "What's your prognosis?" 

Maybe he meant to answer, but an unthinking move drew Levi's eyes to his missing arm. Erwin didn't want them there. 

He hadn't recoiled from Erwin's touch either, hadn't even flinched. He should have flinched. This wasn't fun anymore.

The growth had stopped the bleeding at his throat, then at his chest. He could hear now. 

"You didn't come alone."

Levi's face confirmed it. He might have said something, too, but Erwin listened elsewhere.

Erwin canted his head toward the opening of the grave, past which someone's heart skipped like a scratched record.

"Your traveling partner. They're dying."

The muffled gasps now reached both their ears. Levi stiffened before unhanding Erwin and scaling the hole with great speed. Erwin remained where he lay to make the most of this reprieve before, with little warning, every fiber in his body pulled taut and lifted him out of the coffin and then, out of the grave. The lazy haze of blood loss was gone, supplanted by instinct and the knowledge, the certainty, that Levi was desperately unsafe. 

He pulled himself up in time to watch the doctor thrown onto his back, in time to bludgeon the creature advancing on him and hurl it over his shoulder and into the soft earth. When his thinking mind flickered back on, his hand was at the throat of someone as terrified as she was familiar.

Her light hair stuck damply to her face. She shook violently, and looked around her in such a daze that it seemed she had no idea how she'd gotten where she was at all. It was her. The one who'd followed him, who he'd thought gone.

"Doctor," she called, though her voice barely carried. "I'm s- I'm sor-" 

The moon struck her face and finally, Erwin understood why. 

His eyes shined as he squeezed his damp collar and tipped his bloodied, trembling, hand into her fanged mouth. She resisted and turned away and Erwin insisted and said, "I know. I know. I know." He'd been squeamish too, at first. It was an acquired taste. Maybe she was young. Maybe she hasn't suffered long. Levi fell to his knees beside her and watched in perfect silence. She'd fooled him, too.

She was starving, he knew, had always been starving. He remembered starving like this. He remembered trying to go without. He'd have gone twice as mad in half the time had someone bled as he had. 

He hadn't even considered, then, when he'd first traded those few meaningless words with her, that it could have been anything but a weak human heart. He never thought there could be another. He never thought he wouldn't be alone.

"You knew, then. You could have said something. Anything," he said, needed to say, though she was in no state to answer, to understand. 

Levi had his wit about him when Erwin hadn't, couldn't, and had already returned with a flask filled from the cooling coffin. Erwin remembered himself, moved her hair out of her eyes and laid his jacket on the earth for her as he and Levi both helped her rise to a seat, all else in the world forgotten but her. He expected the ground to sway from the familiarity of it. From creaking decks of ill and needy to a patient of one.

Levi pressed the flask into her hands. She looked at him as if for the first time, and then, disbelieving, at the gash at his temple.

"I'm sorry. I didn't want to, didn't- I don't know how I..."

 

* * *

 

Levi frowned, his skull throbbing as adrenaline begun to wear out, but instead of the wound at his head he considered his entire body, covered in Erwin's blood. One wound was nothing.

She had not wanted, had not meant to. Levi thanked his dodging skills at the thought of sharp teeth, the unintentional warm-up for the swiftness of his moves. It was nothing.  
  
It should have been worse. The doctor's mind would fail him if he let one more second be spent thinking that he had meant to kill a man, and that this man had saved him.

Cold crept inside his limbs, one by one, and he cared not know whether it was the fight that left him, or something unnamed.

"Doesn't matter," he said as he held Annie's head so she wouldn't fall back; observed the grey of her skin beyond even the dull night light. Exertion had already further weakened the beating of her heart. When the glass touched her lips she pleaded, silent. Her eyes flew from the doctor to Erwin in another apology, tired and guilty. "Don't think," Levi repeated for her, for him.  
  
The girl drank carefully as if each small mouthful burnt her throat. Too soon, she stopped.  
  
With a trembling voice she tried to say she had waited, long, so long, she'd waited for the hunger to pass, for the pain to stop. She'd thought she could wait longer.  
  
The doctor did not wish to exhaust her further, did not know how long it'd take for her body to begin its desperate healing. Wasn't sure she should drink more of this blood so alike to hers, lacked the knowledge for this type of biology. Starvation had worn Erwin's face when he'd read the report, now it stole Annie's. He imagined the pain. He hadn't lived it. Levi had nothing to help with save for what little he'd held in his hands, a stained knife, half a vial of spilled blood.  
  
He waited for the breathing to even and the panic to ease, however slightly. Annie thrashed once, legs jolting, but then even the wind descended, even the shaking.

"You knew," Levi said to himself, too low to be heard, but Annie nodded.

She whispered. "'Hurt."

Levi lowered the girl's head on soft cloth when the last of the tremors subsided, and from the corner of his eye he watched Erwin kneeling still. There would have been a reason as to why he looked as distressed as if he had just felled them both with his own hands, out of his own will. He hadn't known either.

It was striking how one stood here with a death wish but a beating heart he ignored, how the other lay there struggling to hold air in her lungs, with a hunger she could not. It was arresting that the doctor found himself in between, and that he had not left. Could not.  
  
For now, he faced the simplest emergency.  
  
For this blink of a moment, he hadn't attempted on Erwin's life. Erwin hadn't fought for his.  
  
"She has to be looked after," the doctor said, sliding an arm under Annie's back to lift her like he'd resume a conversation, like Erwin hadn't seen. Like they weren't in the middle of the land, city hours away, bodies aching.   
  
Levi watched the man's arm. Defiantly, his eyes. Then he glanced at the nearby hole in the ground. "Won't need help with the lid?"

 

* * *

 

Thought it was meat she craved, but the cut was never raw enough. City girl. Didn't know much about trapping or hunting, so she started fights just to lick her knuckles when she limped home. Ran from a troubled girls' school and drifted on the wind ever since. When asked her age, she answered twice. Time forgot her at fifteen. 

They washed the blood away in a nearby stream and hitchhiked back into the city to the early hum of factory lines and the whistles of grimy urchins. Levi spun yarns to their driver of a successful morning hunt. Erwin's ears led them past men with a badge in one pocket and instruments in the other.

Thirty years, she drifted. Thirty, she said, and Erwin nearly wept. She wasn't alone anymore. Her fate wasn't his anymore. 

They returned to Levi's office at the empty clinic. Color returned to her as she emptied the flask she held with white-knuckled hands. The doctor checked her vitals and prescribed bed rest before recalling the nature of his patient. She forgave the oversight.

When she ran, she'd sworn off blood. Bad luck. Would've been a nice girl without this hiccup. Well, nice enough. For years, her head pounded, her hands shook. She forced down human food. If she knew she had one boot in the grave, she could always throw a fist.

She met no one like her until she met Erwin.

She had tailed him through several cities before dropping pursuit when he caught her at his heels. She wouldn't say why, but it wasn't hard to guess. Erwin had been feeding. She'd smelled it on him. He'd grown more powerful than he'd ever known. A devil on earth. She needed to watch, needed to know he wouldn't simply kill her if he knew. But his ears were far more practiced than hers. He would always hear her first. 

Instead, she followed from afar, tracked bite marks by local paper and saloon rumor to New York. 

The city deafened her. It was like nothing she'd ever known. In days, heartbeats any farther than the length of her arm became noise. This was no lonesome country road or quiet town. But he was here. 

She caught word of a place that needed quick feet, of a man who hired strays off the street. A man with many eyes and ears. A man with laudanum. 

When the report dropped, she almost left the city. She'd never been hunted before, not in streets so slippery and narrow. 

She almost left the city until the good doctor, apropos of nothing, activated every cell in his network to hunt for a man whose description was awfully similar to her own mark. Infiltrating the network and finding him first was no trouble, and neither was being the first to find Levi and take him to Erwin.

"Enough," she said suddenly. "I don't need sleep but I do need to- to think. Recess 'til morning. Then, I ask questions."

"Fair," Erwin said. Levi nodded.

She rose out of her seat and took a step toward the door before coming to a stop. "Those hunters. I can't-"

Erwin stepped forward. "I'll-"

"Upstairs," Levi said to her, though he looked at Erwin. "Guest room."

She gave him a nod and left the office. They listened to the stairs groan, to the door upstairs open and shut. Erwin let his eyes fall shut, too, let out a heavy sigh. Here was the answer to his prayers, and for an hour, he could barely stop himself from coming between her teeth and the doctor's throat. He could hardly hear her over the sweet song of the man's blood. 

Distantly, he said, "She even looks like me, a little."

He felt his own trickle down his front. The wounds weren't closing correctly. He never did like silver.

"You should have let me guide her home," he said, turning to try and hide a wound from a doctor. He couldn't leave knowing she could be a drop too hungry, could come downstairs and finish the job. 

And he couldn't stay.

 

* * *

 

“No,” the doctor simply said. He put aside his pen, closed his notebook. He sat up. “She's one of mine.”  
  
He needed not tell he wouldn't have Annie leave right then with a man who locked coffins from the inside, no matter that anything of Erwin would always be closer to home than any job, any medicine, any bed Levi could give her. Annie was still his employee. Now, his patient. She'd get better here, be safe here, before she did anything else.

She presented the same symptoms, the same pain Erwin once told a scientist he'd felt. Briefly, Levi wondered if it was at all possible that the girl wouldn't hate meeting with Hange, and he wasn't sure. For now, he only hoped she recovered.

His hand already held the doorknob when Erwin worried aloud about decades of hunger and the smell of blood, and Levi almost laughed. His eyes found the man's lips at once on purpose, at once against his best judgement. “Doubting I can handle a little bloodthirst?” he asked. Then he demanded, "Stay here.” The door remained open after him.

The clinic's hallways were still dim, ghostly for their unusual silence. It was rare that the corridors held no muffled murmurs of chatter, no echoes of patients. No hurried feet hitting the hard wood floors but his own.  
  
The supply room was near enough. If Erwin wanted, he could leave right then. He needed mere seconds.

They had walked through the night until fields became paths, until paths became roads. They had ridden in silence not to let a girl hear, or perhaps Erwin hadn't dared, or Levi hadn't found the words. He'd followed the man's steps watching his own. He'd watched through a window as rain fell.

The washing room was farther down. Levi tried not to catch a glimpse of the state of his clothes in the mirror, his tired face. He left only when grime had properly disappeared from under every fingernail, when cold water had sufficiently steadied his hands.   
  
Erwin hadn't left.   
  
Levi felt the man shift minutely at his return, faint like a breath. For a second he wished he could pin him with his only his eyes like a butterfly to a board. For another, he wished he didn't.

The skin of his throat had scarred in tortuous paths; Levi had chosen silver carefully. Dearly. He disregarded an ache at the thought of closeness, then at the thought of asking, and decided not to ask. There wasn't a need to overthink it, he reminded himself, or even think at all.

He laid out the instruments on the desk, one by one. He rolled his sleeves up, unrolled cloth and thread. The back of his neck glowed when he turned to look at Erwin, straight on.

  
"Shirt off. Chest first."


	28. Chapter 28

Erwin had suspected what Levi meant to do, but he could still hardly believe it. It was a curiosity he should have left unsated, but now, it only grew. The man had been ready to kill - until the very moment he could have, but no good man wouldn't hesitate at taking a life - yet here he stood with his folded arms and unfolded instruments.

Erwin unbuttoned his shirt and strode to a chair with great leisure. The one, he couldn't help. One hand could only maneuver so quickly. The other was deliberate. Maybe if he was sufficiently infuriating, the doctor might find it easier to want nothing to do with him.

An old insecurity quietly returned as the sight and sound and smell of this man returned him to a swaying world, a world with an endless horizon. It was a feeling that had become a certainty on a ship that now rested on the ocean floor. Levi has never, and will never want him in the way Erwin wanted him. He could posture all he wants of his ironclad free will or wild, untethered spirit, but even now, though he knew Levi would sooner finish the job than offer him a single kind word again, Erwin missed him. Desperately, humiliatingly, he missed him. 

Far more, infinitely more, than he missed his blood. 

Even as he stabbed and threaded with entirely too little care and, suspiciously for a professional of his caliber, needed to rethread a perfectly threaded area several times.

The doctor barely took his eyes off him as he cleaned and replaced his equipment, wouldn't give him the private relief of a single wince. Erwin's grip tightened on the chair's arms as he forced his breathing to slow. 

Levi moved to his throat with a jerk on Erwin's chin, and stood closer. 

He could be staying a few days, or a single night. Annie could come down any moment and demand they leave. So Erwin watched him as he worked, followed the cast of his lashes and the curve of his nose. A souvenir or two for the open road.

When he finished, Erwin asked him lightly about charge, to which Levi scoffed. Erwin buttoned his shirt and moved to leave. 

"And where are you off to?" Levi asked, half turned.

Erwin took the door knob to close up behind himself. 

"Dinner."

 

* * *

 

Levi almost called after him. Almost went after him, and almost felt offended. He couldn't stop the thought before it had formed. Dinner was right here.  
  
He did understand why Erwin hadn't asked. He did understand he might never take this from him again. Erwin had never taken so much as he'd left.  
  
The doctor's fingers continued to itch long after they had tied the ends of a thread over a bared neck, over a heart. It had been too far-off a time since castaways had needed hands to hold the needle, and there had been none better suited.

It wouldn't entirely explain why it had felt this uncomfortable, as if Levi had instead stitched his own flesh, why he'd needed to steel himself to bear each puncture and why he would have wanted to tear the skin apart and close it up and erase the marks his hand had made only to open them all over again.

Erwin had born the pain. Levi would have threaded a hundred times to have him remember, to have him explain; for the feeling of taunt muscle and quiet breaths under his hands to never end.

The man should have healed himself. He should have concealed the offense and the last of his weaknesses like he had before, brushing it off as merely a scratch, as nothing at all. A scar was too easy. A scar was too human, and too flawed, and too real.

The doctor gathered his instruments and went at last to properly wash his clammy skin, then he waited the few more hours his tired eyes would remain open before sleep might mercifully claim him. He did not know why he waited. This time, and all the times he had waited. Always he had waited, when he never had to. It was an odd thing, the simplest thing, too simple to accept.  
  
He still wanted now what he'd wanted then.

Levi nearly suspected Erwin had come back to wake up a storm. The waves, too, kept crashing long after the door had closed.

For the first time in years Levi saw scalding fumes and burning coal, his grip on a shoulder as saw cut through bone, his hands wiping sweat off a troubled brow.

The sun rose alone. Late morning had the doctor check on the past days' schedules and his own missed appointments. By mid-day he walked up the stairs that led to a not-girl's door and knocked, expecting silence.

 

* * *

 

Erwin dined all night.

He returned to the clinic in the morning. It was a simple thing to slip through the milling crowd and up the stairs.

"How soon did you detect me?" He asked her when she opened her door before he knocked.

"Top of the stairs," she said.

Erwin shook his head and offered his arm. They slipped out and didn't stop until they reached a packed street fair, a busy bridge, a frequented park. Wherever they stopped, Erwin pulled down the hat she'd picked out at the fair over her eyes and timed how long it took her to detect the rat on the corner, how many children played in the grass, or which passerby had heart complications.

He cast the net wide to survey her strengths. Her preference for lonesome roads left her hearing and scenting unchallenged and underused. He declared a break by midday before aggravating the headache she was poorly hiding. 

But her sight.  He found out entirely by accident when, on the bridge, asked why she'd turned so suddenly, she said simply that the glint of a man's watch had caught her eye. She couldn't understand why he couldn't see him, too. He was only across the length of the bridge and riding in a carriage, itself the size of the head of a pin - to Erwin.

It could have been innate, or it could have been the product of years of practice. Maybe a little of both. He was glad to have caught it before he tried, unwittingly, to make a bloodhound out of a hawk.

They returned to the guest room, slipping in as they'd slipped out. On the way, Erwin spoke of his own beginnings, and she asked questions. Questions about his family, his mentor, his wanderings. The blood, the hunger, the reports and the hunters. Of a biologist and her assistant. She asked about Levi. Then again, about Levi. Then, unfooled by his tangents and misdirects, again about Levi. 

At first, Erwin supposed the doctor - of all the misfortunes - attracted not specific vampires but them all. But her heart didn't falter when she told him that his blood was no more appetizing than any human's. It was even a note too bitter for her taste, once she'd been around him long enough to recognize the scent. No, she was preoccupied with something else. Something only she could catch. 

"You can even out your heartrate," she said. "But you never learned to hide your eyes. His name comes up and your lookers blow. Just a little, sometimes. But I see it." Her own lower to his throat to a wound nearly healed after a night of excess. The stitching had been naturally pushed out of his skin. The growth that had plagued him all his life had just been an engine too demanding for his once-fasting body. 

She wanted to know about the night before, too, he knew. The coffin. The doctor's attack. Erwin sparing him, saving him. She hadn't yet asked, but she will. And so will Levi. 

Erwin missed the coffin.

He stood at the window. She'd propped up a chair in the darkest corner - nearest the door - and sat in reverse with her weight on her legs. She didn't trust trust him entirely. He understood.

He didn't trust her, either. Not with the knowledge of who Levi was to him. If her ambitions ever eclipsed his own, the only bargaining chip she'd ever need to ensure his compliance with anything she wished had just knocked on her door. One vampire, he could handle, but he was beginning to doubt the singularity of his fortune.

"When?" he asked her as he moved to the door and tapped his ear.

"Top stair," she mumbled. 

"Practice," he said as he opened and shut the door behind him. 

He turned to an awfully exhausted Levi. Shadows pooled under his eyes. He nearly swayed on his feet. He hadn't slept.

"I won't intrude," Erwin said coolly and left, though how he wanted to fret and console as if Levi hadn't steeled himself for murder just the other night, as if no time at all had passed between this moment and their last on open waters. Time twisted and curved around Levi. 

To Levi, he imagined, it left Erwin very much alone.   


* * *

 

His eyes caught on the side of the man's neck briefly and he noted the scarring, messy, but Erwin didn't slow. Levi refused to speak to a turned back.

It felt foreign passing him by, foreign expecting a silhouette from the corner of his eye and it being no mirage. It couldn't be. It must have been why Erwin went.

 

* * *

 

 

The door shut behind him. The doctor opened his mouth to speak.

"You smell different when he's near," Annie interrupted. "He won't tell me why."

She got up. She took a step forward, and half a step back. The back of her head still throbbed. "Like if I look at you wrong, I won't live to do it twice."

 

* * *

 

Levi forgot he'd been about to talk at all. The thought was improbable.

“Then don't look at me wrong,” he replied. “Sit down slowly.” He wanted to ask what else she saw, what else she smelled. He'd far from fooled her. She stared. She would inquire again.

Annie begrudgingly let a stethoscope be brought to her chest and allowed the doctor to listen to her lungs and the flow of her veins, half apologetic, half reluctant. She was healthier, though barely. The migraines wouldn't recede. She agreed to keep track of all the times her head swung and turned. She asked how many notebooks the doctor could provide.

Then, once done, she prodded again, wanting to know why Erwin wished as little not to be examined as she had, even though Levi knew, must have known for a long time. It wasn't due to his nature, the doctor replied. It was only Erwin.

"Tell him not to miss check-up," he added before he left. Annie was still staring.

It had been a day. Levi put off talking of his failed attempt for as long as he could until he could not anymore. He didn't know how to say it. 

He sent out a telegram. Moblit arrived before the afternoon ended.

"He's come back," the doctor greeted.

Moblit carefully added a spoonful of sugar to his tea. "Oh."

"He was in this building not an hour ago."

"Oh. Is that why I needed to come alone?" One spoonful had become three. He stirred calmly.

“Assault prevention,” Levi lied. He gestured vaguely to himself. “Bit tired."

The doctor then explained missing an artery that night in no gentle terms but Moblit assured he felt fine. Levi promised he would continue checking on him as long as he would agree to come by, the following week and the one after and however many would be needed to ensure he didn't overlook a symptom, be it a faint soreness or an unusual itch. Moblit repeated he felt fine.

Levi attempted to make sense out of his composure, but the very thought of a borrowed mind haunted him. He asked the scientist to again say what he'd felt, what he'd seen.

The man recalled words coming out of his mouth that weren't his for anything but the voice. He recalled trying to catch them,  _him_ , and nearly succeeding. The dizziness afterwards. He spoke of it like a curiosity to be investigated. When Levi asked why, he said it hadn't felt menacing. Disturbing, perhaps. 

Levi asked if he feared it. If he slept at all.

"You don't owe me his head, doctor," Moblit replied, attempting to cut down the questions. "In fact, it's better for us if Smith doesn't die. Though he's got to stop the possession thing. And feeding on just anybody."

Levi glared with every ounce of perplexity he could muster.

Moblit paled slightly. "I mean, we have supplies," he added quickly. "It can even be tidy."

"You won't convince him."

"No, but Hange... Hange's often said you could," he said naturally. 

Levi laughed.

Moblit watched him, sitting very straight. "I'm not scared, doctor Ackerman, so I won't cause anyone trouble. But he might."

Levi did not laugh again.

He knew that, night coming, as the night before and the one before that, the man would step out to bite and drink and gorge. He tried not to wonder how Erwin found the taste of any other's blood, whether he came to know any or all or only his favorites, or if he preferred never to visit the same household twice. Most of all, he tried not to think of how many other whispered words, how many other waltz.

Levi waited like one waited for the return of a soul lost at sea, watching empty ships come and go; expecting the wind to blow and bring to shore anything other than the remnants of a hull, its broken bones.

He had but a passing silhouette for himself now, distant words and more distant steps, the back of a neck and the shape of a back. He saw just enough to notice the once-starved appetite, sated beyond contempt. 

He also saw a man not witholding healing a limb, not on purpose. He saw the throat closing up wrong, and made a guess about the heart.

The days passed but Annie didn't leave. Levi reminded her once a day and twice a night how she could go anywhere and never come back, both to work and to this part of town, if she wanted to. Often, she simply hummed in agreement to say she very well knew. She wasn't feeling well enough yet, her stomach still turned, her head still spun.

After a week, Levi asked her how long still. Annie asked him back.

Erwin had not come for check-up. He still picked the girl up some nights, more regularly every time the doctor was busy, or occupied somewhere far. The doctor understood.

In between two patients that day, Levi gave a note for the girl to hand out, and asked for an evening walk.

 

* * *

  
The doctor strolled through darkened streets and unwittingly passed plainclothes hunters whose faces Erwin had long committed to memory. They didn't stop to harass him with their instruments. Maybe they once had, maybe even came away with unbroken noses. Or maybe, the thought of a well known physician stalking the night for easy prey was sufficiently ridiculous that they didn't bother. Yet, here in dark, empty streets, he stalked.

Erwin followed from rooftop gardens and unlit balconies until the man crossed into less frequently patrolled streets. When sated, he was less drawn to him, but the feeling of a string drawn taut persisted. The doctor needn't know. 

He lowered himself to street level, turned a corner, and strode in step beside him.

"Good evening, doctor."   


* * *

 

Levi's steps echoed alone on the pavement for a while, until at a crossing they echoed twice. He felt the man at his side and his own eyes be drawn to the rarity that was the sight of both their shadows on the ground. He nodded. He felt the faint tingling he'd expected in his fingers, and tried to pay it no mind.  
  
Then, he changed ways to lead them to the bay. He wanted to see the water.   
  
Erwin followed. Levi wondered how long Erwin would follow him for, if he asked. It could be a few hours, or even until dawn. It could be until the horizon appeared as it soon would, and it could suffice.  
  
He had other questions to ask first.  
  
“You missed the appointment,” Levi said eventually. “Not a spot left before next week.”  
  
They'd come to a slower pace as noise lessened and buildings thinned. Night chill settled tight on the skin.  
  
“Unless you take Moblit's,” the doctor added. He still did not look, granting Erwin the privacy of letting trouble pass on his face unseen, or if he wanted, nothing at all. “He says hi.”

 

* * *

 

"You're a busy man," Erwin said, "though I'm sure whoever took my spot sincerely needs it."

He considered his next words, and Levi let him. The doctor always did have a sense for that.

Erwin shut his eyes briefly and breathed him in. Levi was a lethal comfort. Something he couldn't quite believe was real. A living myth. Every culture imagines immortals falling from grace, and every one of them is wrong. 

"Truthfully, I imagined you'd want me around as little as possible. This incarnation of me," he clarified, "not the pretender you used to know."

Should he fall, it would not be from grace, but to it.

Erwin walked them back to the clinic, whose lights still shone. The waters were no comfort tonight. Several waited inside, even at this late hour. 

"Ah, you and him spoke earlier. Forgive me," Erwin said at Levi's accosted look, "I witnessed a few changes in myself since I began drinking. Catching someone else's scent on y- a person is one."

On anyone else, it was a faint thing, unremarkable and easily ignored. On Levi, Erwin will come to know half the city with how clearly their marks remained. 

"To be honest, I'm not sure what to think of his greeting," Erwin said. "I looked forward to never having to think about him or his partner again."

Erwin stopped before the clinic doors. 

"But that's not the answer you wanted to the question you didn't ask." 

 

* * *

 

They'd walked side by side. The distance had barely been bearable.  


Levi let the man speak. He let him lead them back and looked only as Erwin spoke, and no word was right. No word was him.

The boy who herded sheep and the man who whispered at sea had been cast away. This wasn't the man trusting Levi, avoiding him, sparing him. This wasn't even the man disappearing, always disappearing.

For one fewer slip of his tongue, one shorter look to the side, a slightly less punctual coming to walk with him, Levi could have believed it.

Perhaps fear had molded itself unto Erwin from the start, from before that, the layers thicker each time until only the shape of a man remained. Levi wanted to pierce the skin again then, in a different way.

"Moblit doesn't resent you," the doctor finally said. "Even seems to understand." He watched warm light cut through the night as if its only purpose had always been to accentuate the curve of a nose, the angle of a jaw. "But I don't.” He watched openly now. "I don't understand why you'd steal his mind. Then let yourself be caught."

Levi wanted the cruelest answer. He wanted the heartless and the remorseless, and to see pain pass faint in those eyes the whole time Erwin so carefully lied to him.

Yet he wouldn't have a single word falling into any other's ears. Each of them were for him only. The man had not begun to reply when Levi spoke again. "Erwin," he said abruptly. "I need a drink."

 

* * *

  
  


Erwin caught his meaning. Any urchin or passing shadow could overhear and sell their words to a hunter for a dime. 

They passed into the clinic, and Levi assured the newcomers as he passed that he will be quick. One of them nodded from behind a vampire-themed penny dreadful. In his office, the doctor retrieved a bottle of wine from a cabinet - a gift from a friend or a patient, Erwin guessed - and retrieved with it exactly one glass which he generously filled and raised to his lips. 

"Steal..." Erwin thought aloud. He himself wondered how to feel about it, how to put it into words. For the longest time, he didn't want to, still didn't want to. "It's not right. The brain is an object, doctor, but not the mind. I can't even say I borrowed it, or imposed myself as its guest. I couldn't say a single solitary word he wouldn't say. I witnessed reality with his eyes and ears and thoughts. I became him, and maybe, he saw something of me. I-" 

He stopped. Words diminished it. It was easier to pretend.

"But maybe you're right. I'm a simple thief."

He returned to lonely summers and bloodless winters, to reams of letters from an ambitious young biologist, to a joined chase for truth. Erwin was satisfied with his catch. Hange wasn't. 

Erwin wanted to hate them, and would have hated them if he knew he wouldn't have done the same.

"And not a very good one. You said it yourself," Erwin said, recalling the cool, dark steel against his skull and warm, red hands at his throat. "You caught me. Again."

Suddenly, this exchange exhausted him. This room, so like Levi in its cleanliness and sparseness and yet care for a trinket or two only he knows the meaning of, exhausted him. This man, most of all, with his hard eyes and his wine-stained lips, tested him. Erwin turned abruptly before his blood could pound out of his skull and said in passing that the doctor had better do something about the anemic man in the exam room he'd been misdiagnosing for a week.

Erwin gorged through the night. Every drop soured on his tongue.

Annie met him in the early hours to practice feeding. Sneaking in was never a problem, but her revulsion made her clumsy. She hadn't yet been able to drink without waking her dinner. He remembered himself. It wasn't an easy transition. They practiced again the next day, and the one after. He insisted Annie meet him outside the clinic.

"There are other cities," Erwin heard himself say.

"If you're this old 'cause all you do is run, then maybe I don't wanna live long," she said.

She leaned on him where they sat on a ledge running along the bridge's east tower. A bullet wound wept from her shoulder. The hunter responsible for it was taking a long swim. There will only be more of them now.

Time and again, she insisted on staying with the doctor and on continuing her courier work to repay him for her lodging. She ignored Erwin's reminders that she needed no rest, that it was a a force of habit and a trick of the mind that convinced her she still needed sleep. 

The sun was rising. The wound still bled through its dressing. It wasn't closing as quickly as it should. Erwin promised to stay with her if she asked the doctor for aid. She wasn't alone anymore. She needn't be afraid. The doctor knows, he understands, and should his understanding one day reach its end, Erwin would sooner swell the riverbanks with blood than let anyone trap her. 

They knew without speaking it that death for them was preferable to capture.

But it was shockingly easy to put aside his own misgivings about coming near Levi again. For her, he'd do that, and everything else in the world. He knew she wouldn't do the same, knew even that she might not mind doing him harm if it suited her. Somehow, his feelings remained undiminished. Somehow, she had become the most important thing in the world. 

Annie must have understood that his promise was sincere, because she made no more attempt to delay before climbing down from the tower. She was still, infuriatingly, excellent at hiding pain.

As the doctor worked, Erwin distracted her with stories of his heists. As a boy, he'd taken to robbing aristocrats of their libraries in the old country. She winced as the bullet clattered out, but her mind was with him. She liked these stories most, he learned, those less-than-noble ones from when he was young and unbothered, about her age. She understood that part of him. Less so, the man he was now. She wouldn't, not for centuries. Maybe not even then. Erwin had never met anyone like himself for long, too long. The certainty of his solitude molded him, limited him. It will not limit her. 

She swiped the offered vial of laudanum from the doctor with a muffled thanks and flew out of the exam room. Nothing would convince her to stay in there a moment longer than necessary. 

Though he knew Levi well enough to expect his refusal, Erwin couldn't leave without offering something in return.

Before he could, a sure-footed woman, having seen Annie leave the room, sauntered right in without being called, made herself at home in the patient's chair, and deflated whatever patience Erwin had left in him.

"Doctor-" she started.

"Pardon me, madam," Erwin nearly snapped, "do you frequent Hell's Kitchen?"

She blinked at him, looked him up and down as if seeing him for the first time. "I live in the area, sir, yes."

"Then you shouldn't order from O'Malley's. Their shipping partners can't package meat right to save their lives."

"I- how do you-"

"Abdominal pain? Vomiting? Dehydration? Joint pain, maybe?"

She blinked rapidly and stood. "Wh- why, yes."

Erwin flashed her his warmest smile and offered his arm. "Iron poisoning, ma'am, dreadful for the gut." He led her out of the room. "Exchange your organ meats for lentils and peas for a good few weeks and lodge a formal complaint against that establishment, won't you?"

She made a thoughtful sound. "That's an excellent idea. I think I will. That sloppy toad, O'Malley..."

Levi stared, motionless, as she strode away with renewed purpose. Erwin waved the whole ordeal away. "I've had to avoid those blocks completely, it's like drinking rust. Anyway, if, um-" But he'd entirely lost his perfectly constructed offer. 

He sighed, and went with the straightforward version. "If I can offer any kind of payment for the girl's shoulder, I prefer it came from my pocket and not hers."

 

* * *

 

 

More than once, the doctor had been wrong. The profession made it so that when it happened, he insisted on being corrected. He demanded that he be corrected.

One passing call on a late night had arrested him enough that he had followed Erwin's instructions, and perhaps the patient had indeed been anemic. Perhaps the lack of iron could be smelled in his blood.

Levi had wished Erwin would come by more often then. He had come less.

"Yeah," Levi told him now, not bothering to feign hesitation. He'd thought of it for days. "There'd be something."

For this, he could pretend he wouldn't have tended to Annie without retaining a part of her salary, wouldn't have removed bullets from them both even with no payment at all.

"The girl isn't going anywhere in this state, so you have a bit of time on your hands," he said. He walked closer. “Diagnose for me.”

The clinic was overwhelmingly full in the colder months. Now, the hunt bled even more people each day. It was simple logic then, wasn't about having Erwin near again, wasn't about proving him wrong, but the man had done it himself when he'd come once to tend to the girl's wound, reluctantly his own, and the girl's once more. Then he did it again in this instant, when he gladly accepted to pose as a thief while offering anything Levi could wish in return. 

The doctor watched Erwin nod, contemplating. He knew too well that no amount of money could compare. The hunt would either begin to die down, or escalate. Then, if officials didn't slow the game, no amount of staff at the clinic would be able to help. But Levi insisted for Erwin to know that he, that they were safe there.

The doctor did not press for an answer. The hesitation in Erwin's voice and the stuttered words earlier had been enough of an answer for a day. "There's a few cases I've put aside. Starting Monday," he simply said, and went to let the next patient in.

Later, Levi walked up to Annie's door. The room had become hers; she seemed content to be alone, though she did not say it. The doctor unwrapped bandages covering red skin, cicatrizing.

“You aren't leaving,” Levi wondered only to confirm.

Annie shook her head. “He asks about it sometimes. But I don't want to run again.”

“They'll come back.”

“They'll come elsewhere.”

“Reminds me of someone I knew,” the doctor admitted.

She lifted her eyes from her shoulder after a long while. “From when you learnt how to take bullets out but not how to suture afterwards?”

Levi smirked. “Never liked the stitches. Only mattered that it'd be done quick.”

Often he forgot the girl wasn't a girl anymore. She'd lived longer than he had. It was easy to forget, easy to want to answer when she asked, so Levi told her more. He told more than he'd ever told anyone living.

He told her he had been doing dirty jobs for the crown, had been doing them for a long time from the very moment he'd been left with almost nothing. He'd been good at it. He'd enjoyed it. In exchange, back then, he had asked for an education. Soon he healed the very bruises he'd been giving. He had never known if anyone else had enjoyed the irony.

Only, after some years, the regime started losing its centuries old power shortly by leaving it in the care of too-greedy hands. A man ruled alone with rules no ones remembered having known, and so no one wanted either them, or him. Wars broke up at his will, up north at first, then everywhere. Levi had the means to be picky by then. He refused jobs more and more. His employers didn't like it, but he'd done it for too long, knew too much. He knew when they planned to let the military take over. Who they wanted gone. How they'd do it.

Had they had his loyalty, he would have probably done it. He saw others do it. A target was a target was just a name, less than that. But the names became ones of neighbors, of colleagues. Levi started spending his days tending to their wounds instead. He'd had enough. Shortly after, the men in arms stopped asking. They left a silent gift for him as a warning.

“Always been monsters down there,” Levi said finally. “For me it's them. For some it's anyone like you. For others, like me.”

He'd seen Erwin going to immeasurable lengths to help but a few poor souls, and he needed not ask if the man had been sincere or trying to be forgiven. The reason was of no importance. The doctor had continued his job. The reason was of no importance at all.

"Does he know?" the girl asked.  
  
"He knows you'll be safe here," Levi said, not to tell her no. When she didn't add anything, Levi rose and made for the door. "Still got some files to read over."  
  
"Another vampire novel?" Annie's concerned voice asked.  
  
"The heroine still can't tell," Levi turned to say before he disappeared.

The doctor finally informed Hange of the one detail. They agreed to meet with him again, or perhaps it was Levi who did. He didn't care to know; soon, Hange had forgotten to be angry.

"Another?"  
  
Levi nodded. "Unforeseen. One of my employees. Younger."

"If I didn't know any better, I'd start studying you instead."

"Not worth the trouble. I couldn't even find Erwin. She did."

"Makes sense, there could be some sort of instinct. Do you know if she would ever..."

"No," Levi cut in, not unkindly. "She wouldn't. She doesn't know herself well enough. And we don't need a repeat."

Silence fell. Hange watched their hands very intently. "Look, I know it's my fault. My fault they're hunted, my fault they're at risk. And I don't know how to make it right again. I never," their voice dropped, "I never wanted this."

"I know," Levi replied, just as quietly. "You'll tell them someday."  
  
He made sure Moblit was still fine before leaving.

Levi repeated the words. His entire resting day, he spent repeating the words.  It wasn't stealing, Moblit had said. It wasn't stealing, Erwin had confirmed. He should trust them. He would. He didn't know what it was, only that he didn't like it. Was intrigued by it. Had nearly killed again because of it.

When night fell, Levi wondered where Erwin had gone to feed. He tried to stop thinking.

The next day at dawn, the doctor dressed carefully, buttoning the immaculate white of his sleeves, then his blouse, slowly. He retrieved the week's schedule and reviewed each day, like every Monday morning.

 

* * *

 

 

Erwin didn't expect this. Levi wasn't vain - he never knew him to be concerned with the author of a diagnosis as long as it was had, but it wasn't too long ago that he'd gone far out of his way to make an attempt on this particular author's life. 

Erwin understood this to be a joint operation. A little like something they'd done once before. 

Regardless, he joined him from afar and learned Levi's patterns to avoid them. Giving the doctor the room he needed, he thought. He may have put aside his animosity toward Erwin for the sake of his rapidly multiplying patients once the chill set in, but he couldn't hide the rising tempo of his heart when he was near, didn't bother to hide his watchful eyes.

For those who walked in and smelled of something familiar to him, Erwin spoke with them in the waiting room or in the privacy of the steps outside. For others, who smelled unappetizing but in no way Erwin could recognize, he simply left a note for the doctor with his observations, his best guess. 

It worked, for a while.

The clinic receptionist flagged him down one morning with a letter addressed to him. No other name was written on the envelope, and he found it was with good reason, because only opening it let him know that it was from Hange.

He would have thrown the envelope aside, but the pull of the sparse few lines of writing stilled the impulse, and he'd already caught a word or two of interest when his eyes descended  to the bottom for a name. They knew him well in more ways than one. 

It was a curt, straightforward account of their research. It could as well have been an excerpt from a briefing delivered to the department chair. Maybe it was. He didn't write back.

But other letters came and informed him of their progress, their obstacles, their hopes, and of what the blood would accomplish. Erwin wouldn't reply, but he read them, kept them. Occasionally, a note appeared in the margins or squeezed in between lines written prior. Always handwritten, never typed. Like the letters they exchanged when they first started corresponding, there was no expectation of reciprocation, of reply, yet they kept coming. Once a week, sometimes, twice a day. Maybe Hange expected to wear him down. He couldn't say yet if their expectations were unfounded.

They were adamant about the possibilities, but like any good thing, they wrote, it would take time to bear fruit. Erwin found himself looking forward to the letters, but not quite being compelled to write in return. Someday, maybe. Maybe all progress needed was a betrayal or two. 

It stung less with every passing day. Though only weeks passed since the report's debut, it felt like months, years. His bloated ego had mercifully deflated with the knowledge of Annie. As long as no one else, especially Hange, knew nothing of her, she was safe. She had a chance in this world. 

Erwin found himself in the clinic more often as nights lengthened. When he wasn't training Annie, he was the clinic's resident bloodhound.

Though neither had caught a bullet or a blade and needed aid in over a month, Erwin returned, and Levi allowed it. He'd been right in one thing. There was little Erwin could meaningfully do here without proper papers and connections. For all Erwin's pomp about realizing himself and to hell with humanity, it still meant less to him than offering a single smile to a nervous patient, than watching Annie grow faster, bolder. 

In time, Erwin offered to take over sutures and whatever else the doctor needed when his assistant was busy or out sick. He found himself steeped in engaging conversations with his late night meals and slowly losing his appetite for any sort of blood save the one he could not have. 

Annie was making progress. As snow whistled through wet streets, her thoughts turned west. She didn't want to run, but she always meant to leave. She spoke of the places she's been and the ones she wanted to see, and of the ones she would show him. 

When the snow began to melt, her ears could find Levi or anyone at all not at the top of the stairs but at the steps of the clinic. Her nose was sharper, too, and her eyes still rivaled any hawk's.  

One night, as they scouted across cramped rooftops, having filled her head with all the summers and winters of his years, she marveled at his luck. To have been a foot soldier and mercenary for so many years, she'd said, and suffer only the loss of an arm was unbelievable. 

"It is. This leg," he said of his right, "I lost seven times. My arms, dozens apiece."  

And when her eyes drifted to his still-lost arm, his own drifted elsewhere. There was a fire, he said to her unspoken question. There was a ship. A biologist. A doctor.

Erwin tried not to press her on the issue of leaving, even as he grew wary of the comfort of his routine. His uneasy truce with the doctor mellowed until he found himself looking forward to heading for the clinic, until he lingered past his usefulness to reorganize patient files or sweep under the chairs. Sometimes, they even spoke. Sometimes, Erwin expected the floor to sway. 

He wouldn't push his luck. Erwin was gone long before they could be the last two people in the clinic, and wouldn't stay long either if he caught himself thinking about him with abandon. Him, and his sharp words and artful hands and bottomless eyes. More than once, he ended conversations to wander icy streets until his unwanted and untoward thoughts withered on the wind. Erwin wondered whether it would have been this difficult were he human, were his blood no object to overcome, and he couldn't come to an answer. 

The windows shuddered one night. Their last patient had been especially difficult, convinced both of their impending death at a superficial scrape and of the evils of rubbing alcohol. He was on his way, disinfected, patched, and muttering obscenities, well after midnight. 

Their patient made a royal mess of the exam room on his clumsy exit, so Erwin put aside his misgivings for one night. He fell to a crouch to collect the instruments that had been knocked over and was struck with the familiarity.

"That enormous Greek on the ship," he recalled before he could stop himself. "Couldn't understand a word you were saying and knocked over the whole cart. Woke up half the deck." Upon hearing Erwin's explanation of their intent in broken Greek, he'd insisted they take a box each of his store of smuggled cigars in apology. 

Erwin's halved arm began to itch. "I can't remember if he made it."

 


	29. Chapter 29

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter: 11.23.17

On the first day, the doctor thought Erwin had refused. The hours passed with no sign of him, and Levi had nearly resigned himself. He'd been foolish. He shouldn't have expected anything. The man allowed him a stuttering explanation and a walk and Levi too willingly believed he had guessed right.

On the second day he learnt Erwin hadn't refused solely for his signature in the registry. The previous evening, he'd stayed until seven. Patients had seen him. Personnel had seen him. Levi hadn't.

He'd accepted, then, but he still resented the doctor. Or he didn't like the job, hadn't wished to meet with illness this intimately again. Perhaps, though it sounded unlike the man, had found no excuse.

But Erwin came back every morning, only to leave at night. He wrote notes for the doctor over patients files.

Levi asked the receptionist where he even met with them. The next hour, he formally forbid any member of the staff to take up appointments outside during winter. During summer too, for good measure.

After two occurrences Erwin avoided, Levi stopped trying to schedule extra briefings. There was no reasonable way to laud the utility of repeating the same information anymore; even the most recently hired doctors had the clinic's intricate processes down after a mere week or two on the job. On second meeting, one of the physicians had asked is she could go back to her preparations, with which she would actually be useful.  
It went on for a little while. Levi chased a ghost across tile floors, hearing of him but rarely crossing his path. The man did his work well, fast. Often, his guesses were more accurate than Levi could have hoped. He did his work hidden, alone. Levi still couldn't understand why he thought the invitation to work with him extended to all of the clinic save for his office's walls.

They saw each other sometimes. Sometimes, Levi even had the time to greet Erwin with full words before he had rounded a corner or closed a door. Inevitably, Levi watched him when he passed by.

One afternoon not long after the man had started, he caught his silhouette through hazy glass, unmistakable, at a little boy's bedside. When he walked past the very same room again later, they were both still there. It was well beyond hours for Erwin. The little patient had no hours, had been there a long time.

Levi heard them laugh. The sound stopped him dead in his tracks. Had him turn around. He'd never heard the boy's laugh. Didn't remember Erwin's. It had been far easier to forget than expect to hear it once more.

Vividly he recalled there had once been a man who would readily stay by a bed all the way through the night if it meant comforting a child.

The doctor came home troubled. He came back into work wanting to hear a laugh again.

Workload increased dangerously as snow turned into ice and broken legs added to colds and coughs and the less visible, deadlier illnesses. Levi barely distinguished where the day begun, and where it ended. He had never gotten used to the grey skies and bleak wind.

As if knowingly, Hange sent a too-cheerful memo to say not to come check on Moblit that month. The doctor couldn't have made it. He received no other word, and assumed they laid low.  
  
For lack of a better way, Levi started adding his own appreciations on the patients notes. If Erwin ever checked the records after having made his diagnosis, he never replied.

Then, just in case, he took the habit of leaving his door open more often than was comfortable for him, or necessary. It only ended up letting the nurses know when they could fetch him.

Cold felt more numbing each morning as the weeks went by, until cold finally, slowly begun to recede. Levi realized he had never worked with Erwin for so long a time before, but even when the man assisted him, he could almost, almost not have been there. He still always left after a few words, when he allowed them at all.

He was on a woman's arm, in stitches that were cleaner than any of the doctor's own hand, in a new pattern of thread and the precise punctures Levi came to recognize and expect.

He was in a little boy's first steps outside the building when Levi had been so sure his heart would fail.

He was in the clean waiting rooms and ordered receipts even when the increasing flow of patients seemed to never end.

Levi only wished he would enjoy conversation sometimes, or stay so much as a few minutes after a demanding day or a long week. He didn't know why he expected it could ever be effortless the way it had been. He still offered, here and there, and would have gladly believed Erwin really was occupied that night, or had to meet with Annie, or had errands to run.

The man was as efficient as he seemed to be thoroughly unwilling, or blind.

Until, after a trying day and a storm of a patient kept them late into the evening and tidying up well into the night, Erwin didn't leave as quickly as he usually would have. Until, unprompted, he recalled memories from another life.

Soon, they filled the room, flaring warm up Levi's spine. He could hear nothing but silence, the blood pounding in his ears.

“He did made it,” Levi told him, putting away a shattered drug vial. “Disembarked after me. Can't tell the same of his cargo.”

They'd worked well, back then. They'd deviated fate from its course more often than was allowed, with bare hands and sheer will.  
  
Levi had wanted this, more of this. In troubling dreams, perhaps only this. Several seconds too late, he remembered to also take the scissors and knives from Erwin's hands to wash.

“Wasn't nearly as terrifying as that old Turkish lady who wouldn't let me check her lungs,” he added, only because he could. “Would have stabbed either of us with her sewing needles if she'd only decided which one first.”

Levi wanted to hear his laugh again. He wanted a smile to reach his eyes, and bear witness. It was suddenly frighteningly easy to admit.

“And I never even translated what she said of you.”

When Erwin was near, it was the easiest thing in the world.

Levi watched him with lazy eyes. He lingered on his face, his neck. Because it seemed it wouldn't hurt, his lips.

Because it seemed nothing could hurt, he asked.

“You ever craved it, in all those years?”

The words weren't meant to be spoken. Levi's spine could have caught fire. “Ever wanted a taste again, just once?”

 

* * *

 

  
Erwin was glad that Annie was nowhere near, or else the frantic tick of his heart would lead her to believe he was being threatened or maimed or whatever else could inspire a bloodrush like this.

He flipped through his memory to find what could have led the doctor down this obscene line of thought. Surely, he'd reckoned with the risks of allowing a vampire into a clinic, though Erwin was, by then, familiar enough with the city to not need the access to personal files. Even if he wasn't, he didn't think he'd stoop to violating the trust between these people and their physician. 

He'd rather not know his meal at all. Even those who returned in good health to say thanks or to accompany a relative were not much more appetizing than they were when they were ill.

"If you mean to...circuitously imply that I've conducted myself in an untoward way with a patient, I-" 

Levi's face hardened as he spoke. So, it was that. He'd even glanced at his mouth, at the shadow of his fangs. Erwin rose. The window panes shuddered again, along with his patience.

"I can't help that a woman I visited one night happened to sprain her wrist the next day. I send all patients with bites straight to you, always have. If my presence isn't wanted anymore, I wish you'd say it plainly."

It could also be, Erwin thought with no little dread, that all his efforts to avoid the man had been in vain. Maybe, one unwitting action of his or another had alerted the ever-observant doctor, clearly long purged of all fondness for him, that Erwin's had, predictably, unfortunately, maddeningly, reignited. 

Of course he craved it all those years, craved him. 

But Levi couldn't know this and then say these things so openly, casually, as if they were still speaking of this man or that woman on some ship that rotted now at the bottom of the sea. He wouldn't be so cruel.

Maybe it was naive to think this arrangement could survive much longer. To be so near, and yet, not at all. 

Erwin retrieved his coat that he'd set aside before and threw it on, though even as he dreamed of finding Annie and telling her that he'll be waiting for her on the coast of another ocean, that he can't stand this city and this cold and this man another moment, he didn't want to look so eager to run. Annie's influence, maybe. He stood at the door.

"What did she say?" He asked lightly of the woman on the ship.

 

* * *

 

Levi chased after the thoughts that seemed to pass through Erwin's mind for several full seconds before he could follow where they led, before he even understood the meaning. He might not have been holding out hope for a direct answer, perhaps not even an honest answer, but he certainly hadn't expected this pledge towards scrupulous work ethics, either.

Of course, it would rather have been about a long-healed sprained wrist, about his more than irreproachable professional behavior. Of course it would be impersonal and sanitized and silenced before it could ever dream to become something else. That was what mattered.  
  
_If his presence wasn't wanted_ , Erwin said like he hadn't avoided the doctor every hour of every day. It was ridiculous. The man expertly toyed with Levi's patience, played too effortlessly with his nerves. If he had been cruel, Levi would have thought he enjoyed it.

“'Said, if there had been a single chance her own son could've been as thick, she would've had no son at all,” Levi replied. He let go of the teasing.   
  
He dried his hands and crossed the room. He stopped only once he was well into the space where Erwin stood. “To think I defended you at the time.” Had he been less careful, he could have very nearly stepped on his feet.

Erwin looked less than surprised, as if he'd expected it once but not anymore. He considered Levi with a slight frown like he hadn't yet found the reason of his coming so near, but surely he would soon find a logical, reasonable explanation.

Levi was logical. Levi had long proved he wasn't reasonable, not with him. All it had ever taken was a single doubt, a single crack. A single invitation.

Yet words failed to speak what Levi meant. It was too raw inside, too wild. It howled. It howled to find a way because the man was ready to go, would go again if he didn't. It was only natural then that the Levi's hand came to rest on Erwin's arm, tight on the heavy fabric of his coat, insisting like a question. 

When he received no answer nor refusal, his other hand joined to close in a fist over golden hair. Then they really were touching, and Levi didn't mind. He wanted an answer, whichever the man picked. Words failed to speak what he meant, so Levi stopped speaking. He pulled Erwin down to him bluntly to sink teeth, full on his lips.  
  
He stole the breath from his lungs without shame like Erwin owed it to him, mouth closing over soft skin in a single bruising kiss, in not even that. Hard enough to draw blood. Harder.

A cabin floor swayed, a wave turned them around. Levi's veins erupted like liquid fire, and he could not tell if he'd rather blame longing, absence, time. He felt a hand coming to hold his waist and he did not know if Erwin meant it for purchase, or to pull him in, or to push him away. He couldn't have known. He had forgotten.

He forgot all but the warmth on his tongue and the heady taste of blood, darker than he remembered. Then another kind of warmth, one he didn't recall.

It held him there. It pinned him down. It alarmed him rapidly in a way he must have earnt for all his recklessness and, soon, crashed over him, them; dizzying in his mind, their mind. The one they shared.

Levi saw but a blur, could not tell through whose eyes. There was no need for his own; he kept them shut tight. He was learning to see for the first time.

The drumming pulse wasn't his own. Nor the maddening softness, nor the unbearable yearning. It wasn't his hidden affections he felt, his repressed weaknesses. They were all Erwin's.

It felt gentle and it felt rough, for all the days apart and every wish, denied, before they committed the crime to dare turn into hope. It was storm, wildfire. But immense. Blinding. Levi thought his heart would split.

He tried to hold onto something, anything, and felt his hands cramp for how tightly they already were grasping at a collar, at skin. He watched through his own eyes, and saw Erwin's face undone. When he found his voice, it was a broken sound. “Fuck. Fuck, Erwin.”

Levi could not contain it all. He was as shaken as he was angry. His words kept coming out severed, tied. “Fuck you. You never told. Would've never told. Never.” He was more than angry. He was furious. His fist found Erwin's arm, the good one, but it did too little to match the blast he'd just received.

He had let time pass. He had tried to forget. He had tried to kill.

“You could've fucking said something. Was there. Stayed right there.” Levi caught his breath, brow pressed against Erwin's chest. He couldn't move. Perhaps he shouldn't be moving. “Anything.”  
  
He felt fingers pass on his nape in a request to raise his head. They were trembling.

 

* * *

 

 

Blood lingered on his tongue. His own, and not. 

There was a weight on his chest, familiar, unfamiliar. Another beneath his hand. He passed fingertips over shorn hair, familiar. Then, through long, inky strands, familiar. 

He was infuriated. 

It was a fury like he'd never known. He could have coughed embers. He could have been reduced to ashes where he stood.

But the inferno wasn't his. This loneliness wasn't his. This winding, inflamed longing wasn't his own. Levi wanted him. All these months, he'd quietly, ardently, wanted him. His heartbeat hadn't risen around him from paranoia. He hadn't been glancing his way out of suspicion or fear. Erwin wanted desperately to know how, to know when he should've expected not a blade's kiss but another kind, when he should have expected this. 

Erwin felt him, belatedly, on his lips.

His fangs had descended reflexively. He must have nicked his lip. He must have tasted Levi, and Levi, him. This was nothing like the others. There was no need to lay in the dark and concentrate until he flickered into another's eyes. This was as natural as breathing. 

Erwin made a sound like a laugh, like a sob, and wrapped him in an embrace. He cursed the arm he didn't have and pulled him ever closer with the other. His fangs ached. His voice couldn't rise above a whisper, and if it could, it wouldn't matter. Words abandoned him.

 

* * *

 

Erwin suddenly pulled him in, knocking the breath out of his chest, and Levi found it fair.

He was furious, yet forgot to voice it when Erwin held him so closely, shamelessly, as tight as he could with just one hand. Levi thought his legs would give under him from overwhelming relief, from disbelief. He held on not to fall, tighter.  
  
He marveled at the weight under his fingers, the warmth around him. The warmth inside. He had thought them lost. He counted the man's heartbeats echoing where his head rested to steady himself, then also forgot to count. If he were to fall, Erwin would catch him.

When he looked up, the man smiled. Smiled with every inch of him.

“Fuck you,” Levi said again, softer. He was still furious.

He was overcome with fondness.  
  
He wanted Erwin. Wanted him closer, over him, under him, everywhere. Wanted him soothing a bruise, wanted him bruising.

Levi watched his reddened lips, his own stinging in reply. His wouldn't heal so fast but perhaps, this once, he didn't mind the burn lingering. “Kiss me,” he asked, because now he could ask. “Properly,” he cared to add. He no longer had to steal.

 

* * *

 

 

Erwin laughed softly. He pressed a kiss immediately into his hair and felt the answering swell of Levi's chest and he asked, "Like this?" and burned alive in the molten pool of Levi's impatience in his own chest.

He pressed another to his temple, to his cheek, to the sharp cut of his jaw.  His fangs had long since unfolded before he returned to lick the blood from his cut lip. Erwin kissed softly, chastely, lost in the heat and the weight and the pull of him in his arms and against his chest and at his lips but for the too-sharp teeth that refused to fold in his own mouth. He pushed at them with his tongue, but they wouldn't fold. He cursed them, had half a mind to rip them out at the root, but they wouldn't fold.

Levi gripped tighter, pushed closer, licked impatiently at the seam of his lips, but Erwin couldn't let him. He would only cut him again and taste him again and lose himself and drain him mindlessly like he'd drained her. 

The connection was fading, but Levi must have caught the fraying threads of frustration Erwin was sure he could have hidden otherwise. The doctor pulled back with searching eyes.

"I can't," Erwin said. He laughed coldly. His hand fell from Levi's nape. "Even now, I can't-"

 

* * *

 

“Hey.” Levi sensed doubt halt him, knew Erwin felt it tenfold even without the straightening of his back, the helpless furrow of his brow. He didn't like sensing it here. “Hey. Easy."

He did not seek Erwin's hand when he wanted nothing more than to feel its weight back at his nape, his waist. Instead, he let the man gather himself and only once their breathing eased, once the blazing longing in Levi's chest was solely his own again, came forward.

For long seconds, he mourned knowing the man's fears.

“Look at me,” he asked, so Erwin did. His eyes followed as Levi's hand went from the worried beat of his heart to pass across his chest, slowly up to his neck, his jaw; when a thumb brushed over his lips. His lips, resolutely shut tight.  
  
That was it, then. Levi cursed his thoughtless insistence and mindless urging. It was simple, then. 

Erwin's eyes returned to watch understanding dawn on Levi's face. Levi almost tasted the thousand of excuses forming on his tongue.

He pulled the man to him to make him forget to the last of them, to speak low in his ear. “You already let me once. Let me again.” His hold on Erwin's neck tightened ever so slightly as if to tell him he was still safe in those arms, still will be.  
  
With his other hand Levi unbuttoned his shirt, just enough to push the collar aside.

He felt Erwin's whole body tense, could not tell if from rejection, or hunger. When the man's hand came again to the side of his face, it was all Levi could do to lean into his touch, baring his neck with it. He pulled him closer yet with a controlled grip, until Erwin's breath ghosted over his flesh, raised his skin.

“There,” Levi hushed, soothing even as his own pulse spiked with want, with need. With the knowledge that, even apart, Erwin would feel it. He curled his fingers and pressed his nails to graze at the back of a head, his mouth to the hollow of a palm. “Kiss me right there. Erwin.”

 

* * *

 

Erwin kissed him right there. He could do that.

Levi's heartbeat echoed in his head, in his bones, in his chest. His will slipped into Erwin's blood. 

He wanted more, so Erwin gave him more. He wanted bruising, so Erwin bruised. 

He seldom drank from the neck. It was too sensitive, too intimate. Only when the throes of sleep presented it in just such a way that he could take what he needed with the presence of a passing feather did he try, and even then, rarely succeed.

He'd never known an invitation, a demand, never been coaxed and lulled. Never pulled by hands in his hair, on his neck.

Erwin sank into him, and memorized the sound Levi made. 

Sometime before the sun rose, he found himself sitting at the edge of a nearby rooftop and at last emerging into his own head as if from a stupor. 

Reflection eluded him. All that existed in the world was the biting wind and the blood on his tongue. The doctor knew everything there was to know about him and held him in his arms even so, offered himself to him even so. He knew what he wanted. Tonight, he had what he wanted.

Erwin could only wish for that clarity of mind. 

He returned to the clinic the next day and went about his shift as if it were any other. The doctor, too, was not for a moment distracted from the fresh wave of hacking coughs and machine-bitten fingers. But it wasn't like any other. Not on land. With neither making a point of stepping carefully around the other, they worked faster, smarter. By the end of the day, Erwin needed to resist the impulse to find the stairs that led to the fresh, salty air of an open deck.

Hange sent another letter, and Erwin got as far as drafting a reply and placing it in an envelope before staying his own hand. 

They worked until the early morning hours. A fire at a nearby garment mill brought the most desperate among the burned women into the clinic minutes before it would have closed. Erwin cast an eye on the book after the last of them were treated and sent home. He'd not taken a penny from them.

He found the doctor half asleep in his office with his eyes swimming on typewriter keys. He found the strength to glare at Erwin's offered hand, but in the end, relented - a measure of his exhaustion. 

Levi swayed on his feet and may as well have shut his eyes for how they refused to focus. Erwin placed a steadying hand on his shoulder and walked him home. He put aside his indignation at the cot in the clinic's storage room. 

The sight of Erwin in his apartment amused him to no end. He made a barely intelligible comment about them moving too fast before pulling him close and giving his neck a teasing bite. Erwin untangled himself and distracted him while the bath filled, on Annie's progress, on his patients, on forgettable local politics, though he was sure Levi understood every third word while he touched him, followed the grain of his hair, the slope of his shoulders, the line of his jaw, seemingly compelled to remember Erwin with his hands. Moving out of the room to give him privacy was an ordeal. 

While he bathed, Erwin made a quick pass through his bedroom to pick up fallen pages or clothing. It was aggressively spare, unlived in. Levi didn't stay here a moment longer than sleep demanded, and less so, if that cot was as well-worn as it seemed.

Levi passed out within moments of hitting the bed. Erwin locked the door and left from a window. He couldn't make himself drink that night.

He and Annie met before the sun rose. She'd earned the confidence and skill to dine on her own and seldom returned but to offer observations or listen to advice. 

Erwin couldn't be sure how she'd taken the existence of the bond. Chances were, she had put it together on her own and Erwin's word was only confirmation. That she acknowledged it as one would a newfound freckle made more sense once Erwin stepped out of his own head. There was no explaining it in words, and even trading blood to visit his mind might show her the shadow of it, and little more. 

There was no vampire army waiting in the wings, no secret society. No plot, no feigned weakness. He regretted doubting her. She'd been well and truly alone. And she wanted to leave. 

She wanted to find more them, more of Erwin, more of herself. She wanted Erwin to come along, to split up and scout and regroup and follow this and that trail. She'd found him, after all.

He wanted to join her. She knew he wanted to join her. 

Erwin returned through the same window as the first rays spilled out of the horizon. Levi's brows knit even in sleep. Erwin let him rest another few hours, himself nearly dozing in the kitchen after making sure there was enough in the cabinets to prepare something warm to ward off the persistent chill of early spring. When it seemed the man was determined not to wake up, Erwin came to him, and sat on the edge of his bed. 

He traced his knuckles, his wrist. Erwin's hand rose to his cheek, warmed in sleep.

* * *

 

It was a hesitant press of lips at first, then a hitched breath, before Erwin finally slipped under his skin and Levi, too, forgot to breathe. The man made him sway, made him to exist only at the place where blood beat red for the warmth of his mouth.

So Levi coaxed him with the last of his coherence, demanded he drinks more, bites deeper, holds him closer with just the low rumble of his voice. He whispered praise in Erwin's ears like it was the sole thing they had been made to hear.

If he wasn't careful, Erwin's name would fall past his lips in between words like a prayer, like he feared to forget, needed the reminder.

Erwin barely drank; he burnt Levi whole even so.   
  
Levi had had him soothe the pain, afterwards, and the man, only half-there, had conscientiously closed every wound on him, in him, with the reverent brush of his parted lips.

The doctor bid the memories away as soon as they worked again, efficient in ways they had not yet been, and Levi blessed the fact even if only for the sheer number of injured they saw that week. He was only interrupted at times, when he turned his head or craned his neck, and the skin stung.

He would request a bed, next time. A bed and an excuse, complain to Erwin for how he'd turned him into a gentleman, always offering dinner first, just to make him laugh, and Erwin would be able to tell before Levi had even spoken, would pretend not to.

Levi lived through every night wishing sleep away. When he could no longer stay upright, he was welcomed by the unfamiliar comfort of catching a watchful eye, a careful hand to guide his steps. He savored the warmth and those very rare times when Erwin would kiss the pulse on his throat, without even asking. The days bled one into another. It was easy to let them. Levi lived through every day wondering if it was the one the man went.

He waited for no warning after the girl told him she wouldn't be keeping the room for much longer, that the doctor should see to find someone to handle her missions, lest it gave him more work. Annie did not mean only hers. Levi had never waited for a warning; he had the luxury of expecting it now.

He had first thought Erwin would as well dissolve in his hands the night they'd fought, the night they'd embraced, and instead Erwin had stayed near, tender in ways he might have known, but this time, Levi thought, this time he was the luckiest fool to ever walk the earth for anticipating, and perhaps if he watched enough and touched enough and carved every stroke in the ridges of his hands and every sight at the back of his eyes, he might hold something of Erwin to keep, something his.

Not today, the girl would say, but soon, for if she could have had her say, she would have already been gone.

Soon was a distant thing when the hours stayed full with too many patients then more and the nights shortened in every way they could.

Soon was almost sufficiently far to bear when Levi chastised himself for succumbing to sleep again, yet woke up once more to the soft touch of Erwin's roughened fingers tracing the curve of his jaw.

Levi did not wish to think, then, of why he was so prompt to stand and dress once he'd teasingly called the man a creep and a dozen other versions of the word, when he would have wished for nothing more than to lie back and bring Erwin with him, and ask about how the sun shone in every place he'd ever called home.

The doctor held the clinic's heavy door open after him that morning too, like he'd taken the habit of doing, many mornings before.

 

* * *

 

Erwin could sleep again.

More accurately, he needed it. The hallucinations and migraines had him halfway convinced that he'd been poisoned until a black out on some empty street in the early hours of the morning clued him in to the culprit. 

Food, too, became enticing. When he and Levi had a moment to share a meal - which normally meant one doing the eating and the other flipping through the papers - Erwin had to refrain from gazing too intently at his plate. He didn't want him to know how so little could have changed him so quickly.

When he simply must have a taste to buttress his sanity, it is usually late at night, usually in Levi's bed, and usually after tasting him in every other way. A taste, always, and no more. His own fears stopped him from taking more. The hands in his hair helped. 

The change was in ways both subtle and excruciating. Exhaustion had been entirely unknown to him compared to how it hounded him now. It crept up on him, threatened to knock him out cold when he was sure he had just a few more waking hours. Hunger was worse. Hunger announced itself with a bullhorn and seized his gut in a titanium vice, and when he tried to satisfy it, he invited only revulsion. He'd seen plenty of dietary upsets at the clinic and so it seemed to him that his system was so unused to this new intrusion that it rejected it as it would a pathogen. He fared better with smaller bites, at first near-raw meats, then lentils, then greens. 

All from a few drops of ambrosial blood. 

It wasn't too late to reverse it. He still craved blood, any blood, still able to last forty-some hours before swaying on his feet, and nearly as long without food. 

It occurred to him that if this pattern continued and he became sincerely, fully human - if that were even possible - he would reverse simply without Levi's presence, without his blood. He had once before, when he'd first had him in his cabin. Levi must know it, must acknowledge it, but Erwin couldn't. He couldn't assign this endless, wretched duty to anyone, much less to a man he loved. 

But despite all his doubts and misgivings and misunderstandings, even Erwin knew Levi would have him if he stayed. He had him now. The hours they spent away from the clinic were rarely spent apart.

Levi was careful not to speak of the future. By his words, any other would have thought that he knew only the present. Erwin knew otherwise. He'd left him before, left without reason, without goodbye. He'll do it again.

This time, with reason, with goodbye. 

But even to that, he had doubts.

Annie was young. Ambitious. She'd described her journeys across heaven-scraping mountain chains and endless miles of open, lifeless desert. Digging graves to wait out the sun. Robbing lost souls and living off the land. She was breakneck and efficient. Erwin wasn't. Even in his youth, he'd meander and wander, and now, after all he's seen, all he's done, the adventurous flame had long quieted to embers. He was perfectly, dangerously content with stability, with safety, with Levi. With meticulously redeeming irredeemable acts one stitch at a time. It was more than he deserved. Levi was more than he deserved. 

But he must. There was safety in numbers. He needed to know that she was safe. He needed to know that they weren't the only, weren't the last.

He wrote back to Hange. Single lines at first, and then more. Leading questions about their progress, mostly. Their responses increased exponentially in length.

It was remarkably familiar. They were all handwritten just as they were when they first began corresponding. Hange made no effort to avoid any subject at all, nor did they fear berating him for everything from his unresponsiveness to the stubbornness of his blood samples to acclimate to whatever it was they were subjecting them to in any given week. It was as if no time at all had passed, as if every wrong had been righted. 

It was confident, maybe arrogant, but not imposing. Hange had made no effort to entrap him or force an encounter, and whatever else they published was either unrelated to himself or so deeply submerged in jargon that the sensationalist rags had no patience for it. He'd known Hange long enough. They didn't regret what they'd done, never would. But they hated the way it unfolded. They wanted to make amends. Erwin thought, maybe, they'd waited long enough.

The chill broke on the morning he received a letter in which Hange asked, offhand, how Annie was doing.

The chill returned, but Erwin alone felt it. He flew into the examination room, interrupting the doctor and his patient.

"They know," Erwin said.

The doctor's annoyance disappeared at the sight of the letter in his hands. He began looking for his words. He looked surprised, though it seemed not in the way Erwin expected. It looked more like a revelation.

"They know," Levi confirmed.

Erwin left the clinic. 

It took hours to find Annie with his hearing reduced to several meters and the sun hounding him from above. He found her, as he had when they first met, at an outdoor table at a cafe under a large, dark umbrella. As ever, she was undisturbed with the news. Excited, even. 

"Let's go," she said, glancing at the bag at her feet he was sure carried all she had in the world. "Right now."

She stood, and looked like she meant it, and sounded like she'd been waiting for just such a spark to light the next act of her life. She hoisted her bag over her shoulder, left a bill on the table, threw on a comically large black hat, and set out.

"Tonight," Erwin said to her. "I want to say goodbye."

There was nothing in the clinic's record book to indicate any case that another nurse or physician couldn't handle just as well. Erwin left a note in Levi's office and made his way to the pier. The ship was boarding.

 


	30. End

****

Levi watched the waters ripple, the setting sun paint them red.

He'd left the clinic shortly after he'd made sure his schedule really was cleared and the head nurse had sent him away, promising to supervise, only to make him leave. He'd went too early into the evening with almost nothing, guessed he wouldn't have a need for much; not with this man. Not with the sea.

The crew caught his eye when he arrived, and Levi followed as roughened hands readied the ship for departure in the practiced ways of seamen. He approached almost expecting to see the Maria's captain greeting passengers, the Maria's surgeon behind him.  
  
He didn’t know that Erwin had reached out to them even once since he'd been back, since before. They hadn't said. He hadn't asked. He hadn't asked many things, had waited for Erwin to tell and, instead, Levi had been content to simply keep working, living. Watching. His hands had roamed every inch of the man, traced every scar. He had seen every hour pass across Erwin’s skin.

This one ship was smaller. She wouldn't sail to the other side of the world. She knew her home port well, her way back.

This time, Levi did not need to wonder if Erwin would come for him. He would be there, waiting. Perhaps he would have preferred to come early, arrange two glasses and a bottle of his choosing, before he came to meet him. Perhaps, even, with a smile threatening to break at the corners of his lips.

He wouldn't have found a way to throw immortality away, to ever afford it. He must have thought of Annie, of the world before them, the one they could build and live in. Then, the responsibility, the caring he reveled in. 

He would have several more lives to fill.

Levi knew he was a weakness amidst the dream, one Erwin liked kissing the lips of, one he welcomed madness for; one he loved to learn and hold and be held by, and he was glad for it. But a weakness still.

Erwin had taken his blood many times, many nights. He'd plunged his thin fangs ever so delicately in the doctor's wrist, the doctor’s neck, sometimes even laid there with him while sleep claimed Levi and Levi waited to see if sleep would claim Erwin back, if he would let him see it.

The blood he took made Levi more careful around him. He watched for cuts and bruises, when Erwin wasn't looking.

He’d watched as tiredness fell over the man with the passing of weeks, imagined the hunger he must feel for it and watched closer still when all it did was make Erwin drink less. Levi held him tighter in reply, flush against burning skin. 

The doctor had aged this winter too. He'd wanted to ask Erwin if he’d resumed counting.

Levi finally went to board, unsurprised when no ticket was requested from him, his name already written down in the passengers list. He didn't ask where they were headed, like the destination wasn’t for an unknown sailor to tell.

Erwin had chosen a ship. Levi hadn't expected the sentimentality, cherished it. He had wanted another trip for them, and for this, too, Levi was glad. 

His heart twisted.

He stepped aboard and found his way to the deck before he found anything else. He leaned against the railway there, let his hair be softly swept by the wind. He watched the harbor waiting for the last of sunlight to find gold.

 

* * *

 

 

He wound a scarf he bartered off a crewman round his mouth and nose. His hat, sunglasses and coat were mainstays, so he needn't worry there, though he nearly forgot his gloves. He felt more than a bit like the invisible man, but it couldn't be helped. The sun was no friend of his.

Zacharius would always laugh that he couldn't tell if Erwin was extraordinary vain to so dearly want himself unblemished, or that he simply had flammable, paper skin. Erwin would joke that it was a little of both. He wondered, idly, when the captain had stopped taking it for a joke.

Erwin caught the drum of Levi's heartbeat aboard and moved to the railing as the crew loosened the lines. He came. He simply boarded without explanation, without expectation. Erwin laid his hands on his shoulders from behind, moved his own scarf aside, and pressed his lips to his hair, overcome with all of him.

He stood in such a way that, to any other, he would have simply been whispering in his ear. He lamented having to share the ship with the conservative sort.

"Unfortunately, I didn't have quite enough saved away to purchase every last ticket, so you'll see a few others who've squeezed in."

Thankfully, these other passengers, twenty at most, were mostly couples or families wholly absorbed in their own affairs plenty far away from them.  

Erwin pressed a lingering kiss to one of the doctor's reddening ears. "I want to show you something. I almost can't remember a time when you didn't know what I was, but you hadn't, then, and I sorely wanted to show you."

Just then, their guide, a sprightly young man with a bullhorn, strode up and down the ship announcing the evening's activities. Levi gave Erwin a puzzled look ad the guide a murderous one before bracing himself as the ship raised anchor and took off. 

It took some time to get where they needed to be, and in that time, Levi said nothing, asked nothing, and Erwin couldn't make himself say a word. He needed to, he knew, knew that Levi knew. He leaned back against him and let Erwin steal away his hair from the ocean winds to smooth it back before they were stolen again, let him wrap him in his arm and wound his empty sleeve about himself. Every touch lingered. He wouldn't let Erwin see his face.       

The sun hounded him even past his clothing. Though Levi's blood halted that petulant orb from boiling Erwin alive, he bore in silence every ray like the flay of a whip. He wanted to do this one thing right. Just the one.

Before long, the water became brackish with hidden movement. Gulls flocked overhead. The city's spires became matchsticks. Though the sun had some way to go before it retired, the crew lit all their lanterns and fully illuminated the surrounding waters. 

Erwin listened.

The guide directed them to gaze past the bow, but Erwin moved the doctor to the empty stern, following the trailing echoes of a gargantuan, slow-beating heart. 

"She's coming," Erwin said. 

The waters parted for an enormous, mottled back only a few meters away. Warm lamplight gleamed on her black coat and scattering of distinctive knobs on face and jaw as the fading sky painted deep blues into the ivory-white splatter across her belly and the long, elegant fins trailing just below the waters. A massive fluke with its gnarled, trailing edges rose imperiously into the air before slipping back into the deep. 

Erwin was almost too entranced to catch the look on Levi's face.

 

* * *

 

The doctor leaned back until he felt Erwin’s chest, then he leaned back some more. He didn't remember him ever bringing up the money before, and thought he might ask what amount the man needed to get back. Or he might ask how much one needed to buy a ship.

But Levi only gripped at a railing, at a sleeve. He couldn't face him. Couldn't speak. He kept staring at the faint line on the horizon where sky faded into sea.

Until the moment where, answering to Erwin's warning, the sea moved harsher, closer than he had thought to watch, and rose right under their feet. Levi's breath caught in his throat.

The water receded to leave way to an open jaw, to silver fins, to an immense body that slowly surged before it dived. Soon another joined. Then, a third. Together, they troubled the ocean as if the ocean was too small a thing.

Levi stayed unmoving before the vision for long moments like he feared disturbing it.

The sight raised to his heart when the whales leapt underwater and he instinctively tugged at Erwin's coat, seeking them; Erwin led him, forward and aft and forward again. They followed the gigantic shapes as they emerged, as they lazily twirled and turned. Erwin told him about each of them, about heavy bones and slow hearts, like each was a friend. Levi followed the sound of Erwin's voice, held onto him to stay upright at all.

He knew only the blowing of the wind, the dance of the waters, the rest of the world empty.

The beasts went on to feed unbothered, went to swallow the sea, until they were small drops on its surface, until they disappeared. After a while, the ship stopped chasing.

Levi would have followed for hours.  
  
He cared not to come back to his senses, not yet. He felt selfish. He felt like staying, so he rested his head against Erwin's side. They watched the waves still rising and falling. Levi listened to the man's heart, the sound echoing in his own ribs.

Erwin had wanted him to see this. He’d wanted to show him the wonders he had gathered, perhaps for centuries.

The man ran deeper than Levi would ever know to tell, inside, meant more than he'd ever know to name. Levi needed not say it.

Levi wanted to say it.

He turned his head where it stayed, barely, and steeled his nerves when he looked up, looking itself a folly. "Take me here again someday," he asked. "Someday soon."

He tasted seasalt on his tongue. 

"Won't want to see your stupidly handsome face when I'm all wrinkled," he added, only to tell the man he knew, and almost smiled. "Come back anyway."

His eyes quickly sought the ocean again, its surface calming once more in ways no part of him could. He would have admitted aloud he will miss it, miss Erwin, when the man held out his only hand, uncaring that anyone saw, and brushed cold fingers across his cheek.

 

* * *

 

Erwin's soul splintered in revolt. It blinded him, deafened him, squeezed his lungs and heart and gut like a living coil, the only part of him seemingly immune to his stupidity.

The thought had been pushed to the back of his mind, but now it occupied every inch of it: if he leaves again, it will be the single greatest regret he'll ever know.

He turned to him, though Levi had turned away, had not seen the war on Erwin's face, hadn't seen Erwin's hand rise to steal the ruddy warmth from his face.

"I think," Erwin said, "I want to be wrinkled, too."

Levi's brow descended, and the whole of him became taut as a wire as he looked up at him, as Erwin's hand fell.

"I've never," Erwin said before Levi could speak, "stayed in one place for long. Not after I'd been run out of one town after another."

He never wanted to, after his first 50 or so years. He never wanted to try. He wanted to try now. He wanted to grow old. 

Levi gave him purpose. Their work gave him purpose. 

They bickered and disagreed as often as they moved as if a single being. They learned from one another, bettered the other. Levi wasn't so averse to those damned sutures anymore. Erwin learned nuances of the profession he would have never known otherwise. Levi was eating better with Erwin's prodding, sleeping better with Erwin's presence. Erwin was more content, more fulfilled than he had any right to be.

But Erwin was also breaking more than several bones a week and spraining parts of him he never imagined could be sprained since he reconciled with the man and with his own humanity. Though he took only a drop when he was sure he would go mad with how he starved for him, his body reacted as if he'd swallowed mouthfuls, as if he'd feasted. He still, a slave to habit, leapt from too high edges and scaled walls forgetting that his bones would not calcify before dawn, his hands would not stitch themselves shut before his eyes. The braces he still wore on both legs from his last unthinking jumps might at last begin to rewrite centuries of muscle memory.

"I thought I knew what I was," Erwin said, "when I stopped chasing rats and started hunting men." The version of himself that drank from any which person and terrorized one city after another had been exhilarating in its novelty. "I thought that was me. I wanted it to be me. I wanted it to be easy." Exhilarating, and hollow. A costume. A character, and him, the actor.  

The ship was turning back. A large spray enveloped them. Erwin removed his glasses and lowered his scarf. His skin itched, his eyes watered.

"I didn't – and still don't – know how to ask this of anyone, especially you," he said, trying to reign in the note of desperation he caught in his own voice. "To ask you to give yourself to me when I don't know how to give in return, when I left you once before."

He held fast to the railing with his one hand as the ship dashed across the waters. His skin burned. His right eye, closest to the setting sun, had begun to dim. Levi watched it until he couldn't anymore, until his hands shot to lift his scarf, where Erwin stopped him. 

"Idiot-" Levi started.

"Don't."

Levi didn't let go. Erwin wouldn't, either.

"If I'm still such a fool that I leave with Annie as soon as the ship docks," Erwin said, "I want to remember what I've done." 

At Levi's bemused look, he added, "The last time the sun caught me unaware, the burn didn't fade for decades."

Levi pulled him immediately into the shadow of the funnel that poured ink into the sky, pulled and swore and said the meanest, bitterest things and meant none of them. Erwin could barely see from his right eye.

His heart bled for that girl for whom he was little more than a passing curiosity. But she knew she wasn't alone. She knew of the bond. She knew how to sneak, how to drink, how to fight. When not to fight. She knew immeasurably more than he had known at her age. He'd given her everything she could possibly need to make it on her own. 

Maybe, one day, she'll visit. 

Levi made a move as if he wanted to stalk off in a fury, though surely he'd understood that his blood bested even the sun's lasting kiss, that if Erwin stayed and became even a fraction as human as Levi, the burn would heal like any other. Erwin pulled the man to him, chest lighter than it had ever been. 

"Those dime novels you're fond of take a few liberties, but I can play along," Erwin said with a smile as Levi reddened. "Won't you invite me home?"

 

* * *

  
Levi did not grasp the word's meaning before they came ashore, and Erwin fell into step with him. He could easily blame fear or embarrassment for the heat running up his spine.

Home, he thought the following morning. The following night. Home, he repeated, tracing the scars marring a neck for the tenth, the hundredth time. He finally understood when the burn had healed and he'd sufficiently reprimanded the man for this foolishness and every single other one before, and Erwin had protested none of them, had only caught the hand at the side of his face to kiss still slick fingers, one by one.  
  
The doctor worried less, then, that the sacrifice was too great, that he might not be worth weakening muscles and breakable bones, that he did not know what was. He caught the way Erwin's eyes softened, lingered, as if witnessing a miracle.  
  
Levi felt his own nerves quiet first, then his roughened palms. The ever-present tremor eased, warmed like chilled skin to a fire.  
  
There wasn't a need to spill another's blood anymore. Levi shed but his own, willingly, gladly, to stain Erwin with and taste on his tongue afterwards, and Erwin drunk eagerly, gave back eagerly, gave his beating heart with open hands. With just one.  
  
One by one, the days passed by.  
  
Their worlds still collided, at times, and the doctor wouldn't have traded teaching Erwin how to cook for any world at all, unsubtly entertained by the way he trusted not the process of properly roasting meats for a lack of habit at first, and how he burnt every meal without fail afterwards.   
  
He wouldn't have renounced the graceless care he allowed himself to provide while the man learnt to inhabit his own body again, invoking his lack of patience for unnecessary injuries or his unwillingness to bring more work home, the excuses finally giving way only when Erwin would sometimes still not know to expect rest, and fall asleep against his arm.  
  
He wouldn't have changed a thing even as Erwin came to question the doctor's reach; watched his improbable network move, planned with them. Discovered familiar names. He learnt they might have unconsciously upset a city mayor he'd needed the favors of, then, might have unknowingly changed the mind of a counsellor's wife who heard the workers' voices. Levi reminded him he could send a word next time. He reminded him once.  
  
They kept working together. Sometimes, they could have merged. Sometimes they needed not speak at all.  
  
They crafted habits. If the doctor kept the blinds shut more methodically than fragile skin demanded, he insisted it was out of cautiousness. There wouldn't have been a crime the neighbours wouldn't have already thought of, already whispered.  
  
But Levi openly watched only then, hidden, as concentration etched lines in the man's brow, as smiles gently carved the corner of his eyes. As life kept them there.  
  
He forgot to breathe the first time Erwin stepped into the light. He started chasing dawn on his face, his eyes; forgot to fear anything after that.  
  
Levi filled his lungs as wind whipped salt and sand. The distance in their steps closed to a still.   
  
They came to walk on the edge of the sea whenever they wanted. Levi wanted it often. He wanted to see every burning ocean, every setting sun.  
  
He lived unhurried. Soon, he would rest his old bones against those of centuries, was content simply knowing that.   
  
He would let Erwin marvel about silver against the black of his hair, when it would come, lighter for every pass of his fingers. He would let Erwin tell him about the worth of every second with just his lips; about meeting time, like one would a long-lost friend.  
  
The waves playfully attempted to lick at their feet. The man made not a move to avoid them, followed a bird's flight. Levi smiled. He asked if they should sail again, soft knuckles brushing the withered skin of Erwin's hand.

 

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


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